Lord of Spirits - Israel, I Choose You! [Ep. 103]

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He will be a staff for the righteous, with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the Light of the Nations, and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him, and they will praise and bless and celebrate with song. The Lord of Spirits. 1 Enoch 48:4-5.

The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons, and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat, secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence?

Orthodox Christian priests Father Andrew Stephen DePalma and Father Stephen D. Young host this live call-in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Hey, thanks, Voice of Steve. Good evening, all you giant killers, dragon slayers, and election deniers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend, nearly Double Doctor, Stephen D. Young, is with me, straight from the swamp in Lafayette, Louisiana. And I'm Father Andrew Stephen DePalma in Amas, Pennsylvania, atop the Eldritch Tower of podcasting, perched above a gateway to the underworld. And we are live. And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346. And you can talk to us. We're going to get your calls in the second half of the show. In Mata Trudi, the Tank Roar, we'll be taking your calls.

So this episode is sponsored once again by the Orthodox Studies Institute at St. Constantine College, which exists to advance the study and application of Orthodox Christianity and faithfulness to Holy Tradition. By popular demand, OSI is bringing back our very own Father Stephen D. Young to teach a live course on the Book of Jubilees, taking a deep dive into one of the most important texts in Second Temple Judaism. Course begins on January 7th, 2025, runs for four weeks. You can learn more and you can register at OrthodoxStudies.org. And if you missed Father Stephen's previous course in The Book of Enoch, you can sign up for Jubilees and also get $25 off of Enoch by using that same link. So you can go to OrthodoxStudies.org to register and see all of OSI's course offerings. And by the way, underway right is my course on Tolkien with OSI. And you can still register, everybody. Even if you weren't there to show up for the first class, you can register. You're begging. I know. No, hey, I advertised your thing for the last two paragraphs. Right. I'm just saying, this is like the Costco of courses. You buy in bulk and you save. I, that's true. Like, that's right. Excel.

So here in the United States of America, we've been talking about election for some time now. A lot. You wouldn't think that such an important theological issue would be on every single TV channel, newspaper, and YouTube show. But here we are. So we figured we would weigh in on the most important election in our lifetimes, most important election in the world. So that said, sometimes we give a, a parental advisory at the beginning of an episode. But this time, we're giving a Calvinist advisory. So trigger warning. At least trigger warning. Sorry, Calvinists, just in advance. Blanket. Exactly. If you are sensitive about, if you have Calvinist sensitivity, just turn off your radio right now. Yeah. Although I think, you know, given the general tenor of Calvinists, part of the reason we could go so hard on them is that they could take it. I mean, that is their whole kind of gestalt. So yeah, I mean, being a Calvinist and a snowflake kind of doesn't work.

We have listeners, by the way, from Czech Republic and, uh, Serbia at least tonight, in addition to our US and, oh, a Bavarian, an Alaskan, a North Carolinian, a Canadian, a Californian. I mean, the list goes on and on. South Carolinian. Wow. Apparently, this guy from South Carolina claims that South Carolina is the poor man's North Carolina. I mean, he said it. Oh, we have got an Australian as well. I mean, that's a lot of times on Hawaiian, of course. Someone from the poor man's Ohio. Texas. Wow. Hey, everybody. Nice to see you all checking in there on the YouTube chat. Oh, Northern Virginia. That's not real Virginia, Sam. That's not real Virginia. I'm sorry. Anyway, so what are we talking about, Father Stephen? We're talking about election, which is when God looks down at all of the evil people in the world, and he chooses the lesser evils and puts them in charge every two to four years. Of all the kinds of insects you could choose, weevils. Weevils. Why weevils? I don't know. Well, they wobble, but they don't fall down. Nice. That's a, that is a '70s, '80s reference right there. I don't think they still sell those, do they? Not that I've checked. Who knows? Someone's. They're probably outlawed. They're probably covered in lead paint. Yeah, exactly. With, you know, our childhood chewing on them. Yeah. Throwing lawn darts at each other. Exactly. A lost vegan. Someone stuck in traffic in San Jose. Wow. Uh, most people in San Jose are currently stuck in traffic. Yeah. Like, literally the majority of the city. Yeah. Is at this very moment stuck in traffic. Um, yeah, the entire team of the Sharks. I'm pretty sure is stuck. Be excuse for their performance lately, at least. Anyway, uh, yeah, we're talking about about election and, uh, what it means and what it doesn't mean. And as you probably guess from our trigger warning, we'll be saying that although many of our Calvinist friends keep using that word, it does not mean what they think it means. Um, and for those of you who thought we were going to be talking about, uh, the American presidential election, uh, what's wrong with you? Why would you tune in to hear more about that? Like, seriously, bunch of addicts. Like, after the last couple of weeks, you want to hear more about that, right? Like, I hope all of you listening got the joke and knew that wasn't what we were actually talking about. Um, there's someone out there that's really angry right now because we just bait and switched them. Yes. I'm sure. I'm sure. But trust me, there are a couple of other places they could go to get information about that, um, at the present time, 24/7 for 24 hours straight, if they want to, um, from myriad perspectives. C-SPAN after dark. See, C-SPAN was great back when they did Booknotes. Oh, I never saw that. Oh, Booknotes was like, so that's what they did on the weekends and right when Congress wasn't in session because they had nothing to broadcast. H. So they had two things in the morning. They had this call-in show where they didn't have the calls screened, so it was a lot of people calling in and cussing and sneaking out of the air and causing trouble. Uh, and then the rest of the day, they had C-SPAN Booknotes, which was like book events from all over the country, mostly politics and prose in Washington D.C. Yeah, but lots of other hoity-toity bookstores, you know, and people going to do their presentations, pres, you know, people with their books about World War II and, you know, some listeners' grandpa was one of the five people there who got up to challenge the guy who wrote the book during the Q&A time. That kind of book event. But it was majestic because they were doing C-SPAN Booknotes on cable at a time in my life, uh, when, you know, say on a Saturday, I had been up all night the night before, and man, if you need something to help you go to sleep, that's the one. Huh. C-SPAN Booknotes. Wow. Lull you right into it. Wow. Um, sort of perfect for that Sunday afternoon nap. Boom. Put you right out. Um, so we're not talking about that kind of election. We're not talking about Congress either. Yeah. Oh, was some, we have the, and I'm not kidding about this, the Philadelphia Council of Clergy is tuning in. The entire council. I don't know. I mean, it's a, it's a YouTube account. It says Philadelphia Council of. Not a representative, but they have convened to listen. I assume it's all of them. So hello, Philadelphia Council of Clergy. If it's in Philly, they probably got some Westminster representation there. We probably got some Calvinists. Yeah. This could go, could go sideways. Um, okay. So in general, what are we talking about when we're talking about election? Right. So usually the word elect, if it isn't translated as elect in English translations of the Bible, is translated as chosen. Yeah. Those are kind of used as English synonyms in translation. And when we hear chosen in English, right, like the chosen people, yeah, right, it, it has to do with people are chosen. These people are elect. Picked. Yes. That's what we tend to think. We tend to think picked. That there were a group of options and one of them was selected, right? Elected, as it were, which is related, but not the same word as elected. Yeah. Um, and so this of course, very much plays into where, and we'll be talking about this in more detail, obviously, later, where our Calvinist friends and others before them, uh, and since, probably, have have taken the idea of that word, that, uh, when you hear that someone is chosen or elect in scripture, that means God has has chosen them, uh, generally chosen them, you know, from eternity for something, and it's going to end up to mostly be salvation. Right. Yeah. Uh, that they're chosen for, again, we'll get into that more later. But, um, the word, the actual words in Hebrew and Greek have a little more nuance to them on one hand, and on the other hand, are a little more, more flexible. Um, so it's worth noting that the words we're talking about in Hebrew and Greek are, in both cases, are adjectives. Yeah. And, and it'll become clear as we talk why that's so important. Yes. In this, they are not participles. So a participle, for people who have graduated high school and forgotten their English classes, as most people other than Father Andrew do quite quickly. Yeah. I mean, this is what people think majoring in English is about. Yeah. Is like grammar and stuff. Yeah. It's not. You're reading literature. But yeah, right. But, uh, I only know because for, you know, studying foreign languages. Um, a participle is a language thing. Is when you take a verb and you sub-stantivize it, meaning, right, you take the verb to choose, for example, right, and you turn that into an adjectival phrase, like the one who was chosen, the one who was picked, yeah, right, the one who had this verb done to them, right? So it's of key importance that in neither Hebrew nor in Greek are we talking about a verbal structure that is the one who had this action done to them by God or someone else. Yeah. It's like, it's like the word employee, right? That's the, you know, uh, you got employee. Employee, the one who is employed. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so this is an adjective which describes the person. In the case of, uh, Hebrew, we're talking about the word *bahir*. Um, not to be confused with Bashir, as in Julian Bashir. Yeah. Or, uh, Bashar. Or, yeah, Bashar always wanted to be one of the chosen, but, yeah. Well, he was genetically modified, so. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. He was built to be neurotic. Um, but so *bahir*, in Hebrew, is used to mean something more like, uh, given a role, or set apart for a purpose, or assigned, right, or given an office, right? But again, it's an adjective. Yeah. So it is a word that's used to describe the person who is assigned an office or a role or a task, right? Not just to indicate that they have been assigned that role or that task, but to describe the person who has been assigned that role or that task. Uh, we find basically the same thing in Greek. So there is a verb *kaleō*, or *ekkaleō*, which literally means call, you know, spoken out, yes. Yeah. Uh, and so you could try and butterfly it and say called out, or to call out, yeah. But that gets, there is an adjective form of it. So again, it is not that the participle form of that verb. It is an adjective for the same root, *eklektos*, yeah, which is where we get our word eclectic. Yeah. And that means can mean sort of roughly called out, but it's more like identified. Yeah. Like identified from a group for a purpose. Right. We've tagged this guy, okay? Um, as I mentioned, both of these are adjectives. These account for the vast majority of uses of these words. Right. Different words are used when you're talking about like someone choosing to do something. Right. These aren't the same words. Um, now, that said, that said, I'm, I'm going to do a, sorry, non-Calvinist here, see, just to prove how evenhanded we are. Uh, so, so, uh, there's a certain, there's a certain species of, uh, anti-Calvinist out there, uh, of whom Leon Flowers is an example. And, uh, Leon Flowers is a, is a Baptist. He's like the Texas Baptist Association, they're head of evangelism or something similar. Um, and, uh, Leon is also one of those dudes like Mitt Romney, who kind of looks like a Sears catalog model from the early '80s. Like that particular kind of like handsome dude, like from that era. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. Like Mitt Romney, like Leon, and flat, like, right, right, like, yeah, you know, like on The Simpsons, I'm TV's Troy McClure. Yeah, yeah. Like he would be in the catalog, like looking down at his watch, modeling the suit, right? That's right. Exactly. Um, so, but, uh, he has, to his credit, picked up on the fact that this is an adjective, right, not a participle. This is not talking about the recipient of some action from God or someone else, but it's talking about a quality of the, uh, of the person. Uh, but the example he is given to, uh, describe this is, it's like USDA Choice meat. That is so choice. So someone who's chosen, they're just like, really choice. They're just like, really great. Yeah. No, no. Yeah. That is not what it means. I mean, good attempt to find another use for the word choose or choice other than the one Calvinists use, but, uh, that's the, that's the wrong one. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, but at least I said he was handsome, right? So see, that's, I mean, doesn't know what he's talking about on this point, but handsome. He's no William Shatner. Um, well, guys in his '90s, you know. Yeah. Um, so what are some examples? Words obviously have meaning based on their usage, right? Right. So we've already started setting forth a claim that this is talking about a particular quality of a person that causes them to be set aside for a purpose, uh, or to, uh, be given a particular role. What are some examples of these terms being used in, uh, the Hebrew Bible, in the Christian Old Testament? Um, so one, the one of the obvious and most probably the first one people think of, right, when, if you said to someone, if we were on Match Game with Gene Rayburn, I said, chosen blank. Yes. The chosen people. Right. And you're trying to match with like, Phyllis Diller and Paul Lind and Charles Nelson Reilly. Right. Wow. A good option would be to pick people. Yeah. Right. Uh, chosen blank. Right. Um, so Israel, right, in the Old Testament, as God's chosen people, that's maybe where your, your brain first goes, right? And, and that is obviously, right, the adjective is used to describe Israel a lot. And, and, and people, people from that, they get this idea of like saying that, you know, Israel is picked by God, you know, from all the other nations, you know, like, who do they think? Some people even say, you know, well, who do they think they are, you know, that sort of thing. Setting aside, of course, the big problem of what is Israel. But, but yeah, there's this idea of, of, you know, God looked at all the nations and said, ah, I like this one the best. Yes. I'm going to pick this one, and I'm going to love them more than all the other ones, and they're special. Yeah. Right. And just because I chose, right, right. Um, this is, and side note to Calvinists, as we get going, see, I was about to say chose arbitrarily. If you say, if you say to Calvinists that God makes this choice arbitrarily, in their system, they get really mad. But I mean, that's what, and they say, it's not arbitrarily, it's according to his good pleasure. It's according to his will. Guys, the word *arbitrio* in Latin means will. What arbitrary means is chosen with reference to nothing but one's will. Okay? Arbitrary is exactly what you say it is, like definitionally. Arbitrary, derived from the Latin *arbitrio*, means just exactly what you say. So in the Calvinist system, God chooses arbitrarily, chooses according with reference to nothing but his will, just will. And picked Israel, right? Well, there's a problem with that. There's there's a problem with that when you read the Hebrew Bible, read the Old Testament closely, and that's that Israel is not one of the 70 nations. Yeah. You look at the list of the 70 nations that come of Noah's sons, read through the list, Israel is not there. Yeah. This is in Genesis 10, Table of Nations. Just, just read it. Israel is not one of the nations. Israel is something other than the nations, right, definitionally. Yeah. Right. The Latin word for the nations is Gentiles, right? And most of our English translations don't translate that. In the New Testament, sometimes they do. In the Old Testament, sometimes Gentiles, yeah, translated as the nations, right? So Israel isn't one of the nations. There's Israel, and then there's the nations, right? And so Israel is not one of the nations. God doesn't choose one of the nations. God creates Israel. Yeah. And he creates Israel sometime, I could argue about how much time, but sometime after, right, the, the dispersing of the nations at Babel. And that's true whether you want to talk about God creating Israel from Abraham. Abraham is from Ur. Abraham is a person who belonged to one of the nations, who is called out of that nation to become the father of Israel. Yeah. God did not pick the nation that Abraham had been part of, right? Yeah. And Abraham by himself, *Sumeria*, not *notans*, not the Sumerians. Yes. Uh, but Abraham, and he's called to leave Sumeria, right? Right. So it's made pretty obvious that that's not what's going on. Yeah. Um, or if you want to talk about, right, which would be sort of the nascent beginning of, of Israel, or if you want to talk about the Exodus, if you want to talk about Mount Sinai, yeah, where it's there's now this nation that's been formed by God that has this new identity, and that's what in the later, uh, in the prophets in the Old Testament, they're going to refer to that event as the birth of Israel, right? So if you want to look at that as the beginning of Israel, you've got this hodgepodge group that is, in our modern terms, ethnically mixed. They didn't have that concept, but that is now made into the nation of Israel. They were not a people. God made them a people. Right. Um, so Israel collectively, right, is formed there at Mount Sinai by the giving of the Torah, and they are given a history. When Israel is formed, they are all Abraham's sons. It doesn't matter if that was literally true. They didn't know DNA existed. Yeah. They didn't even have a concept of heredity, by the way. H. Um, I mean, they were far from understanding DNA and that kind of thing, right? Uh, Caleb is an elder of the tribe of Judah. It doesn't matter that he and his father were Kenites and therefore no relation to to the person Judah. He's a member of the tribe of Judah. Judah is his father, right? That's how this works. So they're given this history, they're given this family when they are created, okay? But Israel as a whole, therefore, is not picked. It's created. Right. And by the way, this is telegraphing where we're going later. What made someone an Israelite or not? What made someone part of that nation that God created or not? What made them one of the chosen or not? Was whether they participated in the Passover ritual. Yeah. Were they circumcised? Participated in the Passover? Doing the things that first generation, it was literally participating in the Passover ritual. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Marking their doorpost. It was something they did. But we'll come back to that. Right now, we're surveying the ways chosen is used in the Old Testament. So in what sense then is Israel as a whole chosen? Right. They're not chosen as in picked. They're all these different nations, and God picked this one because they get created. But there is something different about them with regards to the rest of the nations, right? What is, what is that adjective doing? That adjective, right, *bahir*, that we translate as chosen, what is it doing? Okay. Well, we can see that Israel is created, and it is set aside and called to a particular purpose in relationship to the nations. So it has a unique role or a unique purpose. And we've talked about this before on the show, that that ultimately what that role and that purpose is, is priesthood. Right. They are to be a kingdom of priests, as they're told in the Torah. Priests for whom? Right. A priest represents God to non-priests and represents non-priests to God. So the nation as a whole were to be priests to the nations, to the other nations. They were supposed to represent God to the other nations. They were supposed to represent the other nations to God. And on the piece of representing God to the nations, that meant they had to live their life in a different way than all the other nations. This is why there are most of the commandments given in the Torah are only given to the nation of Israel and not to everyone. They're not supposed to stop other people from eating pork. They're supposed to not eat pork, like other people do, right? They're called to a different way of life, to a higher way of life, as a way of representing who the true God is to the other nations, right? And then exhibit a of them representing the nations before God is at the Feast of Tabernacles, when they go and they offer the 70 bulls for the 70 nations, right? They offer these sacrifices to God for those nations, yeah, which is pretty interesting, as as unique to Israel. Like, which other of the nations are offering sacrifices for a different nation, especially to their own God? You know, like this is something that is uniquely Israel, right? And is something given by God that demonstrates that he's different than those other gods, right? The only reason another nation would have to sacrifice to Israel's God is because they wanted something from him, yeah, right, right. Otherwise, he's not their God. He's Israel's God, right? But the idea that sacrifice needs to be made for all those nations to this God means, doesn't just imply, it means that he is the God of all of those nations as well. That's built into the, it's built into the system.

Now, our 19th-century German friends rear their ugly heads once again. This is a whole lot of sorry so and so. There's a lot of sorry so and so out there, right? Uh, sorry, I don't know why that caught me as so funny, cuz you may, you may go out and pick up a commentary on Leviticus, academic commentary of Leviticus. You may look up this Feast of Tabernacles thing. Odds are good that they're going to tell you, or at least point out the going theory, that, oh, actually, actually, since ancient Israel was really, we all know was really pagan, uh, uh, that they were offering bulls to the gods of those other nations, right? Which kind of begs the question, like, so do they, they Google up all 70 nations' gods? Like, they keep a running list? They have some kind of diptych of who the current most high God was in each of the 70 nations? They check in with all their ambassadors, so they know, so they know who to sacrifice it to? So that, that dog don't hunt. That don't make no sense, right? In the first place. And this also has the very common problem with all of these theories of like, oh, oops, look, the editors of Leviticus let slip that they were really pagans. Like, they once again, they just didn't notice something. Like, really, right? Like these, this priestly cast after the exile, they were rubbing their hands together like, aha, we will convince them all that we were always monotheists. And they, oops, these texts that have been being read another thing hundreds of years, you know, with super care, which they are copying, right? They themselves are copying, yeah, yeah. They're the only ones who can read. I know. They just missed, missed this stuff, yeah, right. Can't, can't make this up, folks. Let's, uh, I just, I don't, I don't have that, uh, critical scholar, uh, bone, I guess, right? Like, actually, I kind of can. A couple of times I've tried to come up with something like that as parody and then found out somebody really published an article. You can't satirize anymore. Yes. Yeah. Because you make something up and then, you know, is a joke, and then someone out there is doing it unironically. Yes. Yeah. So, as David Hume said, there's no philosophy so absurd that some philosopher has not proposed it. Um, yeah. So where, where are some places? There's lots of places where this adjective is used to describe Israel. Um, I would point to a few. Isaiah is particularly thick with them. Uh, if you're a 19th-century German, particularly dudo Isaiah. Um, but like Isaiah 41:8, Isaiah 44:1, Isaiah 45:4. Interestingly, in all three of those contexts, God is referring to Israel as his chosen, but in none of those three is he particularly happy with them. Yeah. It's not like, I love these people best. Yeah. These people are kind of the worst, but they're mine. It's more, it's like, it's like when, uh, when Obi-Wan says to Anakin, you were the chosen one. Oh, come on. I mean, can't I reference the worst? The very worst of the Star Wars. That is not the worst of the Star Wars. Oh, yeah. Okay. Actually, I think by a million miles, that is not worse. Attack of the Clones is probably the worst. That may be like the fifth best. Wow. Wow. Like Phantom Menace, first of all, is the worst of the prequels. You think so? Huh? By a country mile. I think episode two is the worst of the prequels, honestly. No, it's mid. It's so wooden. But yeah, well, all of it is because George Lucas wasn't really directing anymore. Yeah. Phoning it in. Well, people, people don't remember that he didn't direct Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, right? Right. He only directed the first one, right? Yeah. Yeah. But now with Disney Star Wars out, like, I know Episode III shines like the stars of heaven compared to, holy cow, Rise of Skywalker. You were the chosen one, but you have made me mad, and so therefore I will let you go into flames in lava. He pointed out the great truth that once you have the high ground, it's over. It's true in all forms of life. I repeat that line. Every one of my dogs will jump up onto the bed while the other dog is down below. It's like, it's over. She has the high ground. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of high ground, uh, chosen is also used to refer to Jerusalem. This adjective is used to refer to Jerusalem as the chosen city. Yep. That may be less familiar to people. Um, I mean, like if you put that on Match Game, maybe you'd match with Ruth Buzzy. I don't know. It's a long shot. You get like one point. Um, but a couple good examples of that are in First Kings 11:32 and 14:21, or Third Kingdoms if you're using the Orthodox Study Bible. And the idea there is Jerusalem is chosen, is the chosen city because the temple is there, and so God has placed his name there. Yeah. Although that's where his presence is. That's where the spirit is. Yeah. But, but I mean, remember everybody, God did not like choose for the temple to be there. He sort of was okay with it when they, when they built it, but ultimately he was, you know, about the Tabernacle. But yeah, yeah. In the, in the broad sense of divine providence, yes. Yes. Right, right. But within the narrative, right, within the narrative of, uh, First and Second Kings, or Third and Fourth Kingdoms, right, within that narrative, God does not like command them to build a temple for him in Jerusalem. David gets the idea to do that. Yeah. God tells David he can't. His son, Solomon, builds it. And then, if you read the prayer, God sort of, in his response to Solomon's prayer, acquiesces, right, to place his name. Well, okay, right. But this is not a case where out of all the cities, God picked this one and told them to put a temple there. That's not what happens. In fact, if, if you're going to make an argument, uh, for what, where God picked, it would probably be Shiloh, actually. Read, uh, First and Second Samuel closely. Um, but anyway, yeah, yeah. Uh, so again, chosen is this adjective describing the place because this city has this special role of being the host to the temple of God. Um, now, it is also used for subgroups of people, meaning groups of people within Israel are referred to as chosen. Okay. So Israel as a whole is chosen, but then also there are subgroups at various points. The chosen, the, uh, what is, what is higher than USDA Choice? Is prime. Higher than Choice. I don't know. Come on, man. You don't know how to grade meat. Look, I buy my meat from a farm out in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Like, there's no like stamps and primes and choices on it, you know? Yeah. You don't. Detest the agricultural errors of the Anabaptists. Actually, it's a big clan of Catholics that I buy from out there. In fact, I was, that was me throwing another bone to, uh, that was that was a deep cut reference for our Calvinist fans. See, I gotta do something for them. I buy my milk from Anabaptists. Um, yeah. Mennonites. Yeah. So, but I buy my, I buy my cows and pigs from Catholics. What can I say? Yes. Well, every good Dutchman detests their errors. So we do, by the way, have one person who's tuning in from the Netherlands. So. Well, I do believe one of the chosen people. Yes. Um, so, uh, yeah, so one example of chosen being used for one of these subgroups of people is in, uh, Numbers 1:16. And everyone's favorite book, the book of Numbers. Um, but it refers to the elders of the people, right, the 70 or 72 elders as the chosen. Right. These are the, those chosen to be the elders of the people. And then it says, who are the chiefs among the tribes? So these people were already tribal chiefs, like Roman Reigns or Solo Sikoa. And yet they're then quote unquote chosen to be elders, to be the elders of the people assisting Moses, right? So how is chosen working there, right? Yeah. Clearly God didn't pick them. They were already kind of in a position. Moses, well, Moses did, right? It wasn't like, okay, I'm going to pick who's going to be in charge. I pick the people who are already in charge. Yeah. Right. Right. That has to make a lot of sense, right? So what this is saying is, what chosen is doing there, what's the word again, translated as chosen? What it's doing there is it's talking about those people who had been the chiefs within the tribes were made the elders of the people. They were given this role. They were put into this office, right? This body, this governing body was constituted by the people who were the chiefs of the various tribes, yeah, right. So this, this is what's going to ultimately become the Sanhedrin. But this first batch, these are the people who are already chiefs of the tribes. They weren't sort of people elected, chosen at random. Moses didn't sort of look around the, the Simeonites and say, I like the cut of that guy's jib, you're on the council, right? Like, this was, they're already leaders. But by far the most common way that this term chosen is used to describe a group within Israel is to describe a military unit. This adjective is described, used to describe Israel's army. Yeah. Several places in the Old Testament, actually. Yes. You're given some number, sometimes a ludicrous number, like 180,000 in one case. 180,000 chosen. They are the chosen. Yes. And you can see this in places like Judges 20:34, 1st Samuel 24:2, 1st Samuel 26:2, 2 Samuel 6:1, 1 Kings 12:21. Us, the Orthodox Study Bible, you know, First Kingdoms, Second Kingdoms, Third Kingdoms. Um, let me suggest that 180,000 chosen doesn't mean that say David went and picked 180,000 people. I mean, he could have been a heck of a recruiter, out of right. But recruiting isn't the same as picking either. I know. I'm just saying, right, like, yeah, I mean, that's, write these names down. Yeah. That's a mustering. That's a mustering. It's not a picking, right? Right. And in fact, if you look at 2 Samuel 6:1, for example, one of those off the list, right? It says that David gathered the chosen, or no, this is Saul. Saul gathers the chosen, yeah. Not that he chose the chosen, right? The verb is gather. Chosen is an adjective, right? Right. So he takes all of those who have this quality of being the chosen, and he gathers them all up to take them to war. He musters them, right? He gathers them all up. So chosen here, right, that verb, that we translate chosen, is referring to certain kinds of qualifications, right? What is that? Well, there are no standing armies in the ancient world in this period, okay? In this period of antiquity, um, the army, your army is is called up and it consists of the able-bodied men in a certain age range, right? Who you gather them all up to make war. That's your fighting force. Yeah. They're not professional soldiers. Yeah. There aren't. I mean, there are little bands of professional mercenaries who travel around, like David forms one of those for a while when he goes to fight for the Philistines and stuff, but that's not your national army. Is not those guys, right? If you could afford to hire some of those guys, you set them up as commanders over, you know, the 12,000 farmers you've planned to pull together between the ages of, you know, 18 and 35, right? Um, who who are your army, right? So this is what the gathering is, gathering those people up. But what does it mean that those people are chosen? Well, it means they meet those qualifications, yeah. They're *bahir* because they meet, they're able-bodied, right? If they're not able-bodied, they're not. Yeah. They're a certain *for it*, right? They are a, yeah, so they are qualified to then have this role as a fighting man, right? Um, and, uh, so we, we're working our way down. You find a lot, this is not so much in the New Testament. The idea is in the New Testament, but the phrase is not in the New Testament. But, uh, what you find a lot in Second Temple Jewish literature is that the term the elect one is used interchangeably with the term the anointed one, I.E. Messiah. Yeah. Right. And of course, anointed, what does the anointed mean in there? It means anointed to be king, anointed to be the Messiah, anointed to this purpose, or to be a priest, yeah. And so here *bahir* is being set up as synonymous with that, right? The one given this office, right? This one who is singled out, who is identified, who is, right? Um, so it's clearly serving that purpose there, right? It's not, again, and especially, uh, as Christians, we would have to say, uh, God did not sort of look at all the people and choose one of them to be the Messiah, right? Right. Unless you're an adoptionist. An adoptionist, or just Jewish and not a Christian, right? Maybe that'll work, right? Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, that, that, that dog don't hunt. Sorry, adoptionist. That might be our first sorry, adoptionist in the whole podcast over four years. It doesn't come. I know someone who kind of is one, um, but kind of. Um, so, yeah, so there's a place where pretty clearly a Calvinist, being a Christian of a type, uh, would, would have to say that elect means something different. But now we come to what, to me, kind of ruins the whole thing. Yeah. What does it mean when in the New Testament, they talk about elect angels? Well, it's St. Paul who says it in the New Testament. And I don't think they is his chosen pronoun, so pretty sure he's a he, just the quality of his pronoun, you and your liberal sensibilities over. Um, it's the royal they, the apostolic we. Yeah. 1 Timothy 5:21. St. Paul refers to the elect angels. The elect angels. But that phrase, the elect angels, is all over the place in Second Temple literature. Yeah. See, there's, are they for you? And, uh, yeah, but you said in the New Testament, anyway. Um, so, uh, in Second Temple literature, a lot of times when it's used, it's pretty clear how it's being used because the elect angels are referred to in kind of martial contexts. So, um, it's depictions of sort of the final cosmic battle between the Messiah and Belial. Right. It refers to the Messiah coming with the elect angels. Well, we saw how elect was used for like a military unit, right? Yeah. So it'd be sort of the angels who have that role, right? Or sometimes it's used to refer to like cherubim and seraphim who have this particular role or status, right? Um, but again, it's very clear that it has to sort of mean something like that, right? Like it, it, it can't mean like the Calvinist version of what that word elect or chosen means. Yeah. Because like within, within Calvinism, it's about God picking certain people to be saved, and then picking other people not to be saved, right? Um, now, now we should say, uh, that this is an inherited, at least part of it, is an inherited, right, view. Calvin did not make the core that up. Before we, before we dive into that, yeah, yeah, right, cuz someone might have said, when we just said, well, wait, can you said, somebody might have said, well, why not? Yeah, right. There might be somebody out there who said, why not? We, you say, yeah, God, God chose which angels would remain loyal and which ones would fall. But why is that a problem? Because there's, that's what we're going to get into now. Yeah. There's no salvation for angels. We're going to explain to you why that's a problem in terms of the Calvinist understanding of election, right? Yeah. Um, so, yeah, we're, we're getting into supra-lapsarian and infra-lapsarian. So say what you want, Calvinists, you can't accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about. Um, so, um, yes, as Father Andrew said before I cut him off, as I so often do, you do the, uh, oh, don't be a sad sack about it. Um, so, uh, this is not, people think of Calvinism as predestinarianism, right? Right. Predestinarianism is actually a very small part of Calvinism. Yeah. It's a big, Calvinism is a whole bunch of stuff. Is a whole system of thought and belief and piety. And it's not just the soteriology, right? There's, it has, alone, just Eucharistic theology has it. Like, there's all kinds of funny stuff in this. This is why Reformed Baptists aren't really Reformed and aren't really Calvinists. See, here we go. I'm currying favor with some of the Calvinists. You have chosen some of them. Yeah. I've chosen some of the Calvinists to curry favor with, while the elected Calvinists, putting down some others. See, I mean, it, hey, if you give me Presbyterians versus Reformed Baptists, I got to side with the Presbyterians. Right. You got to baptize them babies. Anyway, they do have better architecture as well. Um, so, uh, yeah, so in, in terms of what John Calvin himself says about predestination and reprobation, reprobation is the other side, right? Um, and you need to be clear. Calvin very clearly accepted both. The Calvinist tradition at large has accepted both. God chooses people to give eternal life and salvation. God chooses people, according to them, to damn, to eternal torment. Yeah. Right. That's, that's it. That's there. Now, the Lutherans, right, the Lutherans, they're a little more dodgy, a little harder to nail down. They say God chooses people to save, but he doesn't choose people to damn, right? He just fails to choose them to save. You figure out how that works, yeah. But that's a Lutheran thing. Those guys are like jello sometimes. You can't nail them to a wall. Um, can't nail him down. But, uh, the Calvinists, right, very clearly says both, right? But that said, Calvin gets his view of predestinarianism from the Dominicans, okay? He is not really an innovator on that particular front. Now, when you get to some of the secondary doctrines related to election and reprobation, like limited atonement and stuff, their Calvin goes in a different direction, okay? But predestination and reprobation itself, he's getting from the Dominican tradition within Roman Catholicism, okay? To the point that if you go and read, and I do not recommend doing this, you know, I give to the Presbyterians and now I take away. I don't recommend going and trying to read the Westminster Standards. It is so boring. Um, it is like, it is English scholasticism. It is like the most boring possible form of document, right? Like everything tedious and dry about scholasticism, mixed with everything tedious and dry about English philosophy, like in one place. But if for some reason, for a class or something, you have to read the Westminster Standards, or if you just go and look up the statement in the Westminster Standards about reprobation, about people being chosen for eternal damnation, it is straight plagiarized from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Like, you would get kicked out of school if you turned in the Westminster Standards. They'd say, you, you cheated off of, uh, old, old Thomas's, uh, paper. Um, now, it's important though, right? As I said, once you get to the ancillary stuff that flows from that, Calvin goes, and the Calvinist tradition after him, go in a different direction. So for Thomas, and yes, I can't believe I'm the one who has to tell people this, okay? You refer to him as Thomas Aquinas. It's not his last name. Oh, yeah. That's where he's Thomas of. It means from Aquino. Aquino, yeah. Okay. I know, like if you're Lois Lane, calling Clark Kent Smallville, okay, that works. But people don't call me Lafayette. They don't call me Redlands where I grew up, okay? Like, what's up, Redlands? Right? Yes. That it's not a thing. I don't know. I feel like we should call you that now. You want me to just call you? [Laughter] Guam. Uh, I did live there for five years. Old Guam over there. Um, so, right, so you refer to him as Thomas. Anyway, that's why they're called Thomists, yeah. Not Aquinists. Any, yeah. Sorry, end of that particular rant. And why are the Roman Catholics not straightening people out on this? Falling down on your jobs. Um, so, uh, what Thomas is doing, part of what triggered this rant, by the way, dear listeners, is that Father Andrew referred to him as Aquinas in the notes. I know. I know. I'm not safe in my own home. So it's always a good day when I can trigger you. Yeah. So to, to what Thomas is trying to do, and again, I'm no apologist for Thomism, but I try to be fair. So what Thomas is trying to do is he's trying to express a, uh, synergistic relationship between God's Providence and free will. Um, and so for Thomas, it is true, at least in the Summa, right? Um, I am no scholar of Thomas Aquinas, right? I studied him some with a Carmelite monk, so I know something, but far from everything. Um, but, uh, Thomas is is trying to express that everyone who comes to God, God has come to them, and everyone who rejects God, God has rejected them. But what Thomas doesn't do is he doesn't ascribe any kind of causal relationship between those two facts. Meaning, he doesn't say, as Calvin and the Calvinist tradition did, and the Jansenists, uh, did, uh, that God's, uh, accepting.

or rejecting someone caused them to accept, accept or reject God. But he also doesn't say the opposite, right? He also doesn't say that someone accepting God caused God to accept them, or someone rejecting God caused God to reject them, as if they were operating independently and could apply this causal thing to God, right? So there is, for Thomas, an absolute correlation between those things, but no relationship of causation. You can decide for yourself how well that works. Doesn't really do it for me. I don't, I don't think it's a necessary distinction to make. I think the distinctions he's having to make are because he's gone down this sort of scholastic trail of making a bunch of other previous distinctions, right? So he's, he's kind of trying to solve problems that he created for himself with his views on other topics.

Yeah, ultimately, and and he's, he's trying, Thomas is trying really hard in the Summa to reconcile St. Augustine with the other Church Fathers, uh, and by reconcile, I mean trying to make it so that they're all saying the same thing. And there are places where they just manifoldly disagree, right? St. John Cassian, for example, just disagreed with St. Augustine about some things on this very topic, right? But so Thomas is very much, his approach is always to try and reconcile everybody. No, no, they're all really getting at the same thing, right? If you really understand them, right? And so that again creates a whole bunch of problems for himself that he wouldn't have if he'd just say, well, okay, some of these places where they disagree, St. Augustine didn't get it right, then you don't have to try and unpick those knots. Yeah.

But so that Dominican view precedes John Calvin and the Calvinist tradition. Uh, there's other folks, Gottschalk, there's, there's a whole thing here. I'm not going to, later about that. You need to send an email to, to Dr. Cyril Jenkins about this. That's who you need to send. Ask him all about Gottschalk. Wow, you, you told somebody to send an email to someone besides me, someone other than you. I don't think you know who Gottschalk is. I think you think Gottschalk is a department store. So, I mean, it sounds like a German person to me. [Laughter] So, uh, but yeah, go bother. We have a lot of names like that in this area that I live in. We have all these Germans. Go, go bother, Dr. Dr. Cyril Jenkins about this. Okay, he would love, I think, to type you a 2,000-word email explaining Gottschalk and its relationship to predestinarianism. But I will pass over that in, uh, vience at this point. Um, so, um, but I want to try to be fair to the Calvinists, even as we're picking on them. But so Calvin, uh, makes this, the, the Dominican view is sort of a plank then in, in a, a more, to again, be fair to Calvin, in some ways, a more logically consistent system, right? Where, where, uh, Thomas is trying to hold a bunch of things in tension because he wants to reconcile everybody. Uh, Calvin feels free to just choose one of the two conflicting things, right? To go one way instead of the other, and not try to reconcile it, just say one was right, the other was wrong. On these topics, he basically says St. Augustine was right. Bunch of other topics, he says St. Augustine was wrong. But he's willing to just sort of pick a winner on any given topic. Um, a winner is you. But so, uh, keep in mind, we're explaining what the problem is with elect angels. Where are we again? Yeah, yeah. Reorient here. We're, we're getting there. Uh, what's, what's the problem with, with God just picking which angels are going to be faithful and which ones are going to fall?

So within Calvinism, right, the structure of salvation is sort of very carefully articulated on the divine end. When we get into the second half, we're going to talk about on the human end, like the golden chain of redemption, as they call it, and right, sort of how, how a human is saved, right? That's on the human side. The divine side, we're talking about from a Calvinist perspective, God's plan of salvation. So this is in eternity, in eternity past, whatever that means. Or right, various ways, as we've talked about before on the show. I, I think you can't really do any of this Calvinist stuff if you really remove the temporal element. But if you talk to Calvinists, they will insist there is no temporal element. They are talking about the logical order of God's decrees, yeah, in his own mind, in the mind of God. Like they mapped out, they have the mind of God mapped out. Yes, there's some wobbly Trinitarianism here too, in terms of the mind of God and who that one person is. But we, we don't need to go into that now either. Um, so, uh, and the reason this is important, the reason this is important, uh, for the, for Calvinists is that, right? I mean, it may sound absurd, if you're not a Calvinist, it may sound absurd to you, possibly rightly so, that any human thinks they know the logical order of God's decrees in his own mind, right? Maybe rightly so, right? But again, our Calvinist friends would say, well, God has in certain ways revealed this to us, right? So that would be their counterargument. Um, and the core thing, so the core issue here is, our Calvinist friends, most of them, most of them, uh, do not want to make God the author of evil. They don't want to make God the cause of evil in the world. Sure, yeah. I mean, that's, although, yeah, there are some that'll be like, yeah, God created evil. Yes. Who are amazingly consistent and will just say, yes, every evil, horrific, nightmarish thing that has ever happened, God, before he created the world, declared that that would happen and made it happen, right? Um, points for consistency, I guess. But most of them, right? And so, uh, when faced, and this is a little bit of a jab, I admit it, but they can take some jabs, uh, the Cal, the general Calvinist tactic when someone points out the, the logical outcome of these kind of beliefs, like they say, well, that would make God the author, right? Is to make a distinction, yeah, right? And so the real purpose of talking about the order of these decrees in the mind of God is to make certain distinctions, right? So one of those distinctions is between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism. You may be thinking we're in rarified air here, but, uh, I was for a time in possession, I passed them on, uh, for historic preservation, literally, of a set of bulletins from, uh, Reverend Dan Hoff's Church in, uh, in Michigan, who was part of a split within the Dutch Reformed Church. They were his weekly bulletins from the 1920s, and, uh, the bulletins are like half in Dutch and half in English. H, right? Actually more Dutch. Most of the, the English is like the Bible, and the Dutch is like all the announcements, the community stuff. Um, and, and each of them has sort of a theology note, a little theology note on the back for these Dutch farmers, right? To help them learn some things about the faith, right? The, the Dutch Reformed faith. Okay, one of them is about the difference between infralapsarian and supralapsarianism. Amazing. I, I always get that mixed up. I have to go look it up every time. I know. I mean, it's, these are just not words that I use. And I use some words, you know, but these are not words that I use on the. Well, okay, so, so lapsus, right? Laps, that's the, is the fall. Fall of, that's the Latin word for the fall, right? Um, the fall of man. And so, uh, that's the, the lapsarian part, right? And so the question is, where in God's decrees is, is that decree of the fall in terms of, uh, visa election? Is it, is it that God, he, he decreed the fall because he was decreeing election or reprobation? Or did he decree the sin of man and then, and then he decreed to save some because he did that, right? Yeah, right? So, but you know, clear as mud. Okay, it covers the ground. No, uh, infralapsarianism, which is the majority of Calvinists, right? Right? Are infralapsarian. They would say, right, that God decreed that humanity would fall into sin, right? Because they say God decrees everything that happens. So he decreed the fall. He decreed that Adam would sin in the garden, right? According to most Calvinists, infralapsarian, uh, and then having decreed that that all of humanity would fall into sin, God then decreed that he would save some of them and decreed that the others would be left in their sins and go on to eternal damnation. Okay, that's the majority, uh, calvinist view. The minority calvinist view, these people are sometimes described as hyper-Calvinists, though a lot of times hyper-Calvinist is just a word that a Calvinist uses for someone more Calvinist than them, or more blunt about their Calvinism than them, or who they just don't like. But, uh, supralapsarianism is the idea that God decrees that he is going to reveal his glory by giving some, creating some people, and giving them eternal life, and creating other people and giving them eternal punishment. That's like decree one. That's pretty glorious. And so then based on the fact that that's what he wants to do, he declares that humanity will fall into sin as a means of getting there. Okay. So in infralapsarian, the more common view, right? The reason God is choosing to reprobate those people is their sin, which is the product of his decree. But still, they're being reprobated because of their sin. Yeah. For the supralapsarian view, the more hyper-Calvinist view, right? They're being reprobated just to be reprobated, for God to display his glory by subjecting people to eternal punishment. And then God causes them to sin in order to set them up for that punishment. Yeah. I mean, either way, but you can see how infralapsarianism, the more common view, yeah, is kind of a distinction and a dodge, right? Right? Because the sin they're reprobated for is still the result of God's decree. Yeah. It's just, you know, where in this, uh, Rube Goldberg is the first domino being pushed over? Okay. But so how does any of this apply to angels, right? For whom there is no redemption? Yeah. It, it literally says, is it in Hebrews? It's not angels that he helps. Yes. Yeah, yes. Given everything in Hebrews, visa angels, right? That the elect angels can't be talking about election in this sense. No, they're, they're not being saved. There's no salvation for angels, right?

So, brief review here at the end of our first half. Okay. Elect isn't being used the way Calvinists use it to describe angels. When it's used to describe angels, it's not being used the way Calvinists use it. When it's being used to describe, to describe Christ, as the elect one, it's not being used that way. When it's used to describe the elders of Israel or a military unit, it's not being used the way Calvinists use it. When that word is used to describe Jerusalem as the chosen city, it's not being used that way. When it's used to describe Israel as the chosen people, okay, so it's not impossible, right? It's not impossible that all of a sudden, some place in the New Testament could come along and use these same words that are used in the Old Testament and in the Hebrew Bible in a completely different way, right? Yeah, you know, happen sometimes. Someone will come along in the New Testament and just start using these words. It'll be a complete break with the Old Testament usage of these words, start using the words in a different way. And, and this could matter. That's not impossible. It happens, right? Yeah, I, I mean, I can't think of any cases, but, uh, logically, it is possible, I suppose, right? Um, but how likely is it? And if you're going to go ahead and break with all the previous usage, you, you're going to have to have a reason for it within the text. And, and how are you going to signal that? Yeah, how is that going to be signaled in the text to say, now wait, I'm, I'm using these ideas totally differently than they are in the Old Testament? And, and, and let's say the someone we're talking about is St. Paul. Let's say the place we're talking about is the Book of Romans. What if we read what St. Paul says about this in the Book of Romans, and the way those words are used in the Old Testament work perfectly fine? In fact, work better to explain what St. Paul is saying. What then? Yeah, what then?

So yeah, yeah. All right. Well, it's been a good, beefy first half. Um, we're going to go ahead and go to our first break here on this episode about election on Lord of Spirits podcast. So we'll be right back. Father Andrew Stephen Dyk and Father Stephen D. Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio. The centuries after the Protestant Reformation brought about a radical reinterpretation of the Epistles of St. Paul, disconnected from any historical reality. But Paul operated during his entire life as a faithful Pharisee within the Roman Jewish world. In St. Paul, the Pharisic Jewish Apostle to All Nations, Father Stephen D. Young surveys Paul's life and writings, interpreting them within the holy tradition of the Orthodox Church. This survey is followed by D. Young's interpretive translation of St. Paul's Epistles, which deliberately avoids overly familiar terminology by using words and ideas grounded in 1st century Judaism. D. Young hopes to unsettle commonly held notions and help the reader reassess St. Paul in his historical context. Available now at store.ancientfaith.com. That is store.ancientfaith.com. You've probably heard of St. Raphael Hawaween, St. Alexander Hotovitz, liturgical translator Isabelle Hapgood, and other righteous men and women who made their mark on the early development of Orthodoxy in America. But what about the notorious itinerant Bulgarian monk, or Father Raphael Morgan, the first Black Orthodox priest in America, or Ver Johnston, who served the Orthodox Church without renouncing her Theosophist roots? Their stories, and many others, some edifying, some appalling, all entertaining, make up the Lost Histories of the early decades of Orthodox Christianity in the continental United States. Lost Histories: The Good, The Bad, and The Strange in Early American Orthodoxy by Matthew Namee. Out now at store.ancientfaith.com. That is store.ancientfaith.com.

We're back now with Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Dyk and Father Stephen D. Young. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio. And we're back. It's the second half of this episode of Lord of Spirits. We're talking about election. Uh, so we're just going to, you know, have questions. That's the first time I've heard that commercial for my book. Uh, oh, yeah, yeah. And they're talking about how I'm like interpreting things within the Orthodox tradition. I thought I just engaged in rank speculation, no reliable citations. And, uh, so, uh, huh. Go figure. I know, I know. Yeah. So, you know, we'll just go ahead and start this half also with, sorry, Calvinists. Um, we're talking about election and in this half, we're going to, uh, pull up a bunch of texts from Romans, because let's face it, the Bible, that's right there. There is no Calvinism without certain special texts from Romans, uh, at least, you know, the, the predestinarian stuff, uh, which is what everybody. Well, if, if you're going to make the case that there is in the New Testament some this completely different usage of these terms, right? Uh, this is where you got to go, right? Like, yeah, yeah, because if they're not being used in a different way here, they're not being used it a different way, right? Yep, yep. We have come to the locus classicus. Exactly. So this, this half will be all exegesis, all the time. Yeah. Wait, I thought, did exegesis to support my works? False gospel. Oh, okay. Never mind. Hyper-exegesis. Um, just a bunch of prefixes on there. Who people tell me I am online seems to be different than, uh, who I actually am. Who is the real Father Stephen D. Young? Creating some cognitive dissonance. I don't know. Let's do an in-depth, like Terry Gross, Fresh Air style, uh, interview now with just, who is the real Father? Given to you? No, just someday you'll read about me in a Matthew Namee book, my appalling story, and then you'll know the truth. I am going to get him to write that book. We will wait until you're dead. But, um, I get him to write that. Yeah, yeah. Uh, which statistically shouldn't be that long. Um, yeah, I mean, hey, yeah. Can't outrun Romans. Romans chapter 8, beginning with verse 28. So, uh, yeah, here we go. Here we go. 28 through 30. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. I mean, it says it right there that he predestined them, right? Yeah. Case closed. Good night. [Laughter] Everybody, right? So, um, that, that verse 28 is important, right? We don't skip that. So we have this, this sort of chain of, of verbs, right? Predestined, and then, uh, called, and then justified, and then glorified, right? This is the golden chain of redemption, yeah, as it is sometimes called. And, uh, sorry, sorry guys, and apologies to Fleetwood Mac, but we're going to, we're going to break the chain. Um, so where does it begin? Begins with, we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Okay, so we actually have the word called appear first. So you notice something right away? In the quote-unquote golden chain in verse 30, those whom he predestined, he also called. Well, here in verse 28, we have those who are called, and then we talk about them being predestined. Um, but the point here that St. Paul is making, all things work together for good, meaning coming out of the context, right? There are sufferings in this life, there's persecutions, there's all of these things that we suffer, but we know that all of these things are going to ultimately work together for our good. How do we know that? Right? How do we know that? Well, all of the verbs in verses 29 and 30, foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified, are all past tense. They're all completed verbs. Okay? Meaning St. Paul is talking about people in the past. He's not saying this in the present tense. Everyone who he does this to, he will also do this to. He will, or future tense, right? Uh, these are all past tense, right? So he's talking about actual people in the past. H, this is not just generally about, right? Anybody, right? Those whom he knew before we could see that God did this, right? Because he's offering this that for is a because this is his evidence that you and I can trust that whatever is going on in our life right now, God is going to work it to good. Yeah. How can we trust that? Right? And, and, and also, I think it's important to, to note here, like in the second half of verse 29, where it says, uh, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, you know, he, those he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. I mean, isn't this talking about the coming of the Messiah, right? Yeah, yeah. Right, right. And so we conform to His Image, we come as brothers, meaning we're adopted as sons of God, right? Um, so, uh, this is, he's, he's, St. Paul is not saying, oh, well, you could be confident everything's going to turn out okay because I'm going to lay out a theological principle for you here. No, right? That says that everything's going to work out okay. I'm going to repeat myself, right? No, he's pointing to actual people, yeah, right? In the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, right? We can see the course of their life, right? That those who we knew before, back in, in the past, right? Now, the word here that's translated predestined, by the way, is *proorizo*, which means and means to put things in order in advance. And the putting in order, uh, the *orizo* part, that, uh, Greek verb was most commonly used, again, as a military term, for putting a military, arraying a military formation, right? The idea is God puts things in an order in advance. He put things in order in advance so that, so that those people who he knew before could be conformed to the image of his son, right? So that they could become like Christ, so that Christ could be the firstborn among many brothers, right? Well, what does that mean? Well, think about it. For you or I to find salvation, right? Christ was incarnate a long, long time ago, yeah, before I existed. Right? That hadn't happened. I couldn't be conformed to his image, right? I couldn't receive the adoption as a Son of God if Christ hadn't lived the life he lived, if he hadn't died on the cross, if he hadn't risen again, right? All of those things, God did before I existed, from the way we experience time as humans, right? All of that had to be put in place in advance. All of that had to be arranged in advance. And not just that, right? Scriptures had to be handed down, the church had to continue to exist, right? All of these things had to happen. And, and we could go back before that, all the things that led up to the Incarnation of Christ, everything recorded in the Old Testament, all the way back to the creation of the world, all that stuff had to happen to make it possible for me today to find salvation in Christ, to experience theosis, which is what St. Paul's talking about. And God put that all in order so that that could happen. St. Paul is saying, because of that, here's reason one, God did all that, right? So just because you're suffering now, you don't have to worry that this is all going to be for naught, yeah, right? Yeah, he's not laying out like a, a theory. He's saying, look at what happened. And, yeah, and then part two of that in verse 30, he says, and look at those people, right? Everything that was all set up, and then he called those people, right? He called Abraham out of Ur, he called those people to put blood on their doorposts and become part of Israel, yeah, and he, he, it says he justified, he put them right, yeah, he, he set the call of the Gospel to us, right? And then, yes, he put them right, yeah, and he ultimately glorified them, right? By the way, those *also*s there do not have any aspect of temporal succession, yeah, in Greek, these are not like steps, right? Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah. So he's saying, if God does one of these things, he does all of these things. Yeah. And he already said all things work for good for those who are called, which is one of those things, according to his purpose. So if you've received the gospel, right? Then you can count on God to do all of the other things he's promised to do. Yeah. And he's going to say in the rest of chapter 8 that we didn't read, we're not reading everything, we're going to read enough, trust me, but we're not reading. He's going to say, this is where he talks about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God, right? From God's side. And so he makes this, this huge argument that from God's side, God keeps his promises to us. You do not have to worry about God not following through on his promises, right? The promises he's made. Okay. But then, as we get to the end of chapter 8, there is at this time for St. Paul, a big objection. Someone might offer, well, wait a minute, didn't God make all those promises to Abraham? Right? Didn't he make all those promises to Israel? And a lot of the descendants of Abraham ain't doing so good, right? Right? And a, and a lot of the, the, the, the, the Israelites, they ain't doing so hot, right? 10 tribes of them are gone, right? And St. Paul, you're coming here to us telling us Jesus is the Messiah, and looks like most of the Jewish people disagree with you, to boot, right? So what's going on with that? And so as we get into what's now chapter 9, remember these chapter divisions are original, but as we get into what's now chapter 9, what St. Paul's doing here, beginning in chapter 9, is he's answering that objection. Yeah. So, but before we dive into chapter 9, yeah, we do now actually have some people calling. Okay. Um, yeah, it was, I don't know, it was blank for a while, then suddenly boom, boom, boom, boom. And I'm getting all these people in the chat saying, I'm trying to call. It was destined to happen. But yes, so our first caller tonight is, uh, Rosine. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Um, so Rosine, are you there? Yes, hello, fathers. Hello. And, and my understanding is that you are 11 years old, is that right? Yes. I'm Father Tim Curran's daughter. Oh, well, hello, Father Tim. I'm sure you're listening in with your daughter. Um, that is a lovely Irish name you have there, Rosine. Um, so what is, what is your question and your comment for us tonight? I have a question on how people elect elect saints. When people elect saints, when people decide to glorify people as saints, does God automatically have to agree with them? That's a good question. Um, so here's how I would explain it. Um, it is God who makes people saints, right? With their cooperation with him. So if they're faithful to him, um, and especially if it's in a really big way, uh, that's how we usually recognize that someone's a saint. They're really truly faithful to God in a, in a big way. Um, and, uh, God then works with them to, to make them holy, right? To make them like himself, to make them, as Christ says, equal to the angels. And so then after their, after their death, then the church will sometimes, if God permits it, recognize that this is what has happened, right? And so then that recognition comes to a lot of different means. The biggest one is sort of looking at their life and seeing that their life really has this major kind of, um, you know, uh, manifestation of, of the holiness of God, right? And so then, um, often there will be some kind of, of informal veneration of a person that happens. But ultimately, it takes a group of bishops in synod to make the decision to officially canonize or glorify someone as a saint. And, um, and it's, it's a long process. And sometimes when they're going through the process, they discover, hey, this isn't a good idea. We're just going to not do it. You know, there have been people that they've been investigated for canonization that get set aside because it was, they discovered it wasn't a good idea, or there wasn't enough evidence of holiness, or, or whatever, right? Um, and, uh, and I will tell you, you may not know, Rosine, but there have been some cases of some accidental canonizations. Um, for instance, there were, I actually only just learned this recently, there were some cases in which names of people were canonized in, um, in the Russian Orthodox Church, uh, because there was, you know, testimony about them being treated badly by the Soviets or something like that. And then it was later discovered that those people were still alive. And, and they just sort of quietly dropped their names off the list, you know? So it is possible that mistakes can be made. But over time, this stuff gets sifted out. So it's not like bishops make a choice, you know, to canonize someone as a saint, then God has to say, okay, I confirm, or I, you know, I don't, you know, it's really that God is the one doing the work with the person, the actual real change in their life, and then the church recognizes that as being the case. Um, human beings, including bishops, are not perfect. And so that means it is possible that they can make a mistake. And as I said, there are sometimes mistakes have been made. But over time, what happens is any mistakes get sifted out, you know? Does that make sense? Yes. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you so much for calling. Nice to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we're going to take, um, glad you took care of that one. I mean, she, she, you'd be scary. She seemed domesticated. So, but it's those wild kids running around the street, you got to really look out for. Yeah, she seemed, she seemed pretty, yes, yes. Um, from a good, yeah. Okay, okay. We have, we have William calling. Um, so William, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast. Hello, thank you. Can you hear me? We hear you. So what's on your mind, William? Unfortunately, not, not quite so adorable as the, uh, previous caller. Uh, I come instead, um, with a question, in, well, inspired by a friend of the show who is not Bart Ehrman. So, talking about election in the case of, uh, uh, Israel. And I, the church is heading towards it, it seems. Um, in the first half of this show, we discussed how the nation of Israel is not one of the 70 nations, but it is still a nation, um, a 71st nation, um, that was called, um, by taking people from the other nations and grafting them into the branch of Abraham. But the church, by contrast, as I understand it, is supernational, in that it is not above the nations, that I'm sorry, it is above the nations without superseding them, and its existence does not dissolve the component nations. So if I'm following correctly, uh, God chose, um, from the tree of Abraham and grafted some from other nations to build as Sanic Israel, and then chose from the tree of Abraham and the nations to build, uh, the Pentecostal supernational Israel. But also we say that the church is Israel, and the Theodic, uh, chosen nation, and the Pentecostal chosen supernation seem to be different from each other. So what's going on there? I have thoughts, but I'm going to just hand it to you, Father, because I know you have very clear and precise ways of talking about this particular question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, we've, we've got to distinguish some things, right? So the word that's gets translated, and we're, as we keep going in Romans, we're going to get into some more of this, so this will be important, um, to keep in mind, um, the, the term that's translated Jew or Jews in most English translations of the Bible is actually Judeans, uh, which is essentially Judah-ites, meaning descendants of the nation of Judah. Um, Israel can refer to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but generally doesn't. Even though historically, that kingdom was known, sort of in some places, as Israel for part of its existence, um, that is referred to generally as Ephraim or Joseph in the Hebrew Bible. The northern kingdom and the southern kingdom, even though it includes Judah and Benjamin and some of the Levites, uh, is referred to as just Judah. Um, and then Israel is the overarching term that includes both of those, right? Um, so, uh, the, the view that St. Paul is going to take, and we're about to go through the actual passages where he's actually doing this, um, view that St. Paul is going to take is that, uh, Israel has a lot of open space. [Music] Because Israel has a whole bunch of branches that have been cut off. 10 tribes were, right? Plus not all of Judah, Judea, right, have been cut off or were in danger at the time he's writing of being cut off. Uh, but if you know anything about grafting, when you make a cutting, you can then graft in a branch from another tree or another plant in at the point of the cut. And so for St. Paul, people of the nations get grafted into that tree, meaning they draw their life from the root of that tree. That's what it means to be grafted in, and they can now be called one people in one tree. That one people is named Israel still. But the branches, right, if you take a branch from one tree and graft it into another tree, the branch doesn't change and become whatever that tree is, right? So if that's a fruit-bearing branch, the fruit that it bears could be, in an actual tree, could be a different fruit than what the rest of the tree is bearing, right? It remains a branch of the tree it came from. But the branch draws its life from the root, the same root as the rest of the tree, right? So, but it remains whatever it was. And so for St. Paul, right, Israel is now constituted post-second Pentecost of the remnant of Judah, the remnant of Judah with people from the nations grafted in, who nonetheless remain members of those nations. So they remain Greeks, they remain, uh, Syrians, Egyptians, right, whatever else they were, right? But they are now part of Israel. And the people of those nations are essentially, for St. Paul, replacing those tribes who are gone. And he's going to say that more or less explicitly at the end of what we're going to read in this half, um, even though a lot of people miss it when they read it because they don't know their Old Testament well enough. Does that make sense, William? I think so. So if I'm following that, that means that for St. Paul, the Torah is a component of, uh, being a member of Joseph or Judah, but not being a member of Israel? Is that true? Yes, in the sense that there are people who have been grafted into Israel who, yes, who the Torah is not directed to them. Yes. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. All right, thanks very much. We're going to take one more call and then we're going to move on as we roll through parts of Romans. So Candace, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast. Hey, how are you guys? Good, how are you? I'm doing good. Longtime listener. I, I really mean this when I say it, y'all changed my life. I'm coming from a Reformed Presbyterian worldview and I'm no longer in that world. But yes, but to explain, I still have a really hard time understanding Romans 9. So my question is, that's where we're going next. Understand. Yes. I understand the concept of, um, like a, a more broad view of election, that it's not actually individualistic. But Esau and Jacob are, and Pharaoh in that passage are literal individuals. So how do we understand election in that passage where it's actually speaking of individual? Oh, man. Should we just say, just keep listening? I don't know. You. Well, I'll, I'll give you, I'll, I'll give you a general thing, and then we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, yeah, as, as we go through it. Um, so the general, the general thing is, right, the general thing is, uh, St. Paul here is very specifically talking about the promises to Abraham, right? The promises made to Abraham, right? And there's two parts to those promises. One of those parts is salvation, right? It is theosis, it is becoming like the stars of heaven, right? Yeah. But then the other piece is the land, and them being given the land at the end of Joshua, right? As Joshua says, they were given all the land they were promised at the end of Joshua. Sorry, dispensationalists. See, we're equal opportunity. Um, um, that land was the symbol then of the bigger promise. And so what St. Paul is going to do in the case of Jacob and Esau is he's going back to Jacob and Esau, and he is going to talk about their relationship with those land promises. And he's going to use the relationship of Jacob and Esau's receiving the land promises to talk about then the receiving of the bigger promises. So St. Paul is in no way saying that Esau went to hell. So he didn't really hate him. Well, we're going to talk about what that means. Yeah, yeah. It's actually, we're going to talk about what that means. Him, but we'll get there. But, but key to this, key to this, key to everything we're going to do as we're going through these texts is that St. Paul is a person who had literally memorized the Torah in Hebrew, who is intimately acquainted with it. And he's writing to and arguing with and discussing with other people who are deeply intimately acquainted with the Torah. So when he refers to Esau, these are people who know the whole story of Esau, right, from Genesis, yeah, yeah, in all its detail, right? And most re, I dare say, most readers of Romans today are not as intimately acquainted, right? If you just read Genesis, there's nothing in there that would imply to you that Esau was a bad person, that he didn't worship God. In fact, he looks much more pious, forgiving, and loving than his brother, right? So if St. Paul is all of a sudden coming out of the blue with, oh, by the way, this guy went to hell, that's not a very good argument, right? Like if I was trying to prove election to you, right? And I said, well, listen, right? I'll, I'll show you, right? I'll prove to you that election is real, right? Like, uh, look at, look at, um, I don't want to choose too many controversial examples, just came into my brain all at once, but anyway, they said, okay, look at Richard Nixon. He died, went to heaven. He was elect. God loved him. James Earl Jones died and went straight to hell because God hated him. Oh, man. Now, if I make that argument to you, what's going to be your response to me? How do you know? Yeah, how do you know, right? Like, wait, what? Right? Yes. And so there's nothing in Genesis that says anything about Jacob going to heaven and Esau going to hell, right? Yes. There's nothing in there. The two reconcile at the end, and it's Esau who motivates the reconciliation. He's kind of the, the, the bigger person. He's the good guy in the story, right? So if St. Paul is just coming in randomly saying like, oh, yeah, right, like that's not a good argument for that position, if that's really his position, right? So you, you get the Calvinist reading of this requires a sort of circular argument, right? Where you say, well, wait a minute, right? St. Paul says, points out to show election, that Jacob was elect and Esau was reprobate. And I say, well, how do you know Jacob was elect and Esau was reprobate? They say, well, St. Paul says in Romans 9 that Jacob was elected, Esau was reprobate. I'm like, well, that's just a circle, right? You're just, you're saying he's saying that because he says that, right? Like that's not, yeah, that's not an interpretation. Okay, but we're going to go through now, and we'll do, hopefully show you a better way to read that that makes more sense, okay? Awesome. In the context and everything. Stay tuned. All right, awesome. All right, thank you guys. Thanks for calling, Candace. Although I do have suspicions about James Earl Jones for reasons that, you know, and won't be clear to the audience. I know it's a great story if you ever tell it to the world. I was shocked. I was like, uh, justified blood feud. Justified. Um, okay, Romans. Romans. So remember, St. Paul now is entering, he's answering this objection. You've just argued to us that the promises of God don't fail. But when we read the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, it sure looks like most of the descendants of Abraham, most of the Israelites, didn't end up receiving those promises. What's up with that? Right, right, right. Yeah, okay. So, all right. Romans chapter 9, starting with verse 1. I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. Okay, wait. I was going to say, wait a second. I thought the idea that Christ is God was invented in the 4th century. Yes. Clearly. Um, well, he's God relatively, you see. Oh, yeah. Overall. Overall. Well, you know, anyway, sorry, sorry, that's not what this episode is about. I just had to point that out for everybody. Yeah, Paul certainly thinks he's God, right? So St. Paul begins his argument by saying, you know, yeah, that's a good point, right? And as a Jewish person, he finds that deeply upsetting, right? And he has this great display of love that he would be willing to be accursed and cut off from Christ, right? He would be willing, he's saying he'd be willing to be damned, yeah, right? In order for his, the rest of the Jewish people to find salvation, yeah, right? Um, and in saying that, he's kind of deliberately paralleling Moses, uh, at the end of Exodus, when, uh, God is, is ready to wipe out the Israelites and start over with Moses. He's like, well, just do the Abraham thing, but we'll just start again with you because I'm done with these people. And Moses not only intercedes for them, but he asks God to blot him out of the Book of Life instead of the Israelites, right? And this sort of monumental display of love by Moses. I mean, these are the people who have been persecuting Moses too, and threatening to kill him, right? And he's, he's willing to do that for them. Uh, I will note for all you fans of penal substitutionary atonement out there, that God then explains to Moses that that's not how he works. That he does not punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty. He would not anyway. Wow. Sorry, PSA. You're just like, uh, kicking the Reformation right in the gut tonight, yeah, right? Like God literally says it doesn't work that way. I will not do that. Okay, man. Getting right in the soteriology. That's, um, but so St. Paul reflects that same kind of love here, yeah, right? And he says, he points out, right, he, as he said earlier, back in, in, uh, chapter 3, he says the calling of God is irrevocable, yeah, right? So the Jewish people, for St. Paul, are still called upon to be alike to the nations. They're still called upon, right? For St. Paul, though, that involves them accepting Jesus as the Messiah, right? That's part and parcel of how they will fulfill that calling, right? And he says, you're right, they were, they're given all these things, right? Those things that he lists, right? All of it. They have all of this, right? And those of you who are Gentiles who now have it, have received it from them, right? The way you worship the Messiah is from the Jews, right? On and on and on. This is all from them that you've received. And so, yes, it is this horrible thing, right? This horrible thing that so many of them have not received and are in danger now of not receiving those promises, yeah. Okay. All right, verse six. Verse, yeah. But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but through Isaac shall your offspring be named. Let's pause there. Yeah. Okay. Well, no, do one more verse. Do one more verse. Okay. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Right? Okay. So, so, point here, Abraham had lots of sons, not just Isaac and Ishmael either. He had, that's how the song goes, right? Father Abraham had many sons. Did you sing that when you were in Sunday school back in the day? I think at some point. I know I'm one of them. So are you? Yeah, no, that's not what this is referring to at all. Uh, this.

Is referring to literal. He had literal sons. Yes, lots of sons. Yeah, St. Paul is starting with the literal, right? He starts with the literal meaning of what's in the Torah, right? And then he's going to go from that. But he says, look, literally what's in there is he's got all these sons, right? But they aren't all recipients of the promise in the same way, right? The line of promise, the line that's going to lead to the Messiah, that goes through Isaac, right? Right.

So he, he's making an argument. This argument is kind of the same argument he makes in Galatians when he talks about how in those promises, the references to Abraham's seed because "seed" (zera in Hebrew) is a collective noun, yeah. But it could be singular or plural depending on context, yeah. And in Greek, it's explicit whether it's singular or plural, either *sperma* or *spermata*, right? But in Hebrew, it could be either, like "fish" or "deer" in English, right? Um, moose. And so St. Paul is saying, in there are senses in which it is plural, and there's another sense in which it is singular, right? And so he's making that same kind of argument here. There's this sense in which it is singular, it's going through Isaac, right? So he's beginning to construct an argument of, well, hey, you know, the way you observe this thing working now, now with the promises of God, is kind of the way it's always worked, right? It's kind of the way it's always worked.

Continuing with verse nine. Okay, verse nine. "For this is what the promise said: 'About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.'" And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." Yes.

Okay, so Abraham has a bunch of sons, but the promises are reckoned through Isaac, okay? Okay. Isaac and Rebecca then have two sons, you've got Jacob and Esau, right? And before they're born, right? Before they've done anything, God says, "The older will serve the younger." Okay? Okay. Esau will serve Jacob, right? Right. Edom will serve Jacob. Edom will serve Israel, right? So if you read then the rest of the Torah, you see that this is what happens. The rest of the Torah, and then the rest of the Hebrew Bible, this is literally what happens. Uh, we are told in Deuteronomy chapter two that God brought Esau's descendants to the land of Edom, which is part of the land which was promised to Abraham, Esau's grandfather. That God brought them into that land and gave it to them and drove out a bunch of giant clans before them, the same way he was going to do with Israel in the Book of Joshua. Yeah, he did it with Edom first, okay? And because of that, Israel was not to take a single foot of land. It literally says "a foot." It says "the length of a foot" in the text. Israel was not to take a foot of land from the Edomites, their cousins, right? Because that land, that piece of Abraham's inheritance, had been given to them. But then, once Israel comes into the land, what happens? Edom became a vassal country throughout most of the Old Testament history, a vassal country to Israel, later to Judah. Meaning, literally, the older served the younger. And as long as that vassal relationship, that covenant relationship between the nation of Judah and the nation of Edom, pertained, Edom kept that land. They received their share in the promises of God as long as they maintained that relationship with Israel, with Judah, who was the firstborn son, right? Remember the Torah, it's the firstborn son who inherits everything and then distributes the inheritance with his brothers, yeah? Remember Jacob got the birthright, the firstborn status, or Esau? Okay. But then what happens later? Well, we get this second quotation. "Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated." That quote, right? Is from the time of the Exile, yeah. It says, "As it is written." Written where, right? That is a quote from the time of the Exile. It is not a quote from before Jacob and Esau were born. Genesis does not say that God loved Jacob and hated Esau. This is said at the time of the Exile because Edom had turned on and betrayed and attacked Judah while Judah was going into Exile, yeah. So these are about nations now, or tribes, or however you want to conceive of it, people groups. Jacob and Esau as individuals are long, long dead, right? Because of that betrayal, because they didn't keep faith, because of their faithlessness toward their brother Judah, they lost that land, they lost their share in the promises. Okay? So knowing where this argument is going, knowing the argument that St. Paul makes, the same argument in Galatians, where is he going? The ultimate firstborn, who he calls the firstborn of all creation in Colossians, inherits everything. Who inherits all the promises of Abraham, according to Galatians, as Abraham's seed? Is Christ, yeah. So if anyone, if anyone, if any descendant of Abraham wants to receive a share of the promises from the firstborn, what do they have to do? They have to remain faithful to their covenant relationship with the firstborn, with the Messiah, with Christ, right? So the rights are no different for St. Paul than for a faithless Jewish person, right? It's faithfulness to the firstborn that gives you a share. Remember, "firstborn among many brothers," with whom he would share the inheritance. But you have to remain in fellowship with him. Also, I would point out, I say this only because I have seen prominent Calvinists bang up and down, right, on this "Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated," right? And they specifically bang up and down on the "hated" part, right? It says "hated." Uh, and "hated" doesn't mean "loved less." Right? The word "hated" there, the word *miseō* in Greek, it means "hated," right? So it says God hated Esau. Doesn't mean loved less. It only means hate if you're one of those Calvinists. Allow me to direct you to Luke 14:26, where Christ uses the same word, the same verb, when he says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, what? He is not worthy of me." Yeah. Like, you have to have rage against your mom and dad? Yes. That only means hate? Yeah. Or wants us to hate our parents? No, it's like, turn away from, or, yeah. Well, and it could just mean love less, right? Right, right. Which is clearly what Christ means by it, yeah. You know, you need to love your father and your mother, right? Honor your father and your mother, but hate your father and mother, but you can't love your father and your mother more than Christ, right? That's exactly it, yeah. Right. So anyway, that's just a side note. If you're a Calvinist, even if you don't agree with me, even if you come out of hearing all this and you're still a die-hard Calvinist, stop making that dumb argument that's about the verb to hate, okay? Because there are other people who will pull out that verse from Luke on you, if it hasn't happened already. All right, verse 14. All right, verse 14. "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.' So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills."

Okay, so again, Pharaoh, not a good guy, right? Very bad guy. Uh, we still aren't technically told in Exodus, I mean, he very clearly is a stand-in for the devil, but we're not actually told he goes to hell, yeah. Right. His sort of eternal salvation is not in view, right? But notice what the scripture St. Paul quotes says about Pharaoh. "For this very purpose I have raised you up," right? So he could show his power in him and that his name would be proclaimed in all the earth. Okay, that's God saying, "I have this purpose for you." Right? "I have this purpose for you. This is why I made you the Pharaoh." Right? "This is why I made you the Pharaoh, the absolute ruler of the most powerful nation on Earth, sir. I put you there so that my name would be proclaimed to all the nations." Right? And, uh, this goal is accomplished, right? Because again and again, if you read Exodus closely, what you see God saying again and again with the plagues, and when we're talking about hardening Pharaoh, it's hardening Pharaoh so that the plagues can continue. There's actually only one instance where God hardens Pharaoh's heart. The other time, Pharaoh does it. But all the other times, Pharaoh does it. But the one time God does it, it's so that this cycle of the plagues can be completed. And all through the plagues, it says over and over again that God is doing these plagues to reveal who he is to Israel, to reveal who he is to the Egyptians so they'll turn from their idolatry, then they will know that I am Yahweh, he says, yeah. To reveal who he is to Pharaoh, and to reveal himself by what he's doing in Egypt to all the other nations of the world who will hear about it. Which is pretty merciful and compassionate to everybody involved. God doesn't say he's judging Pharaoh and condemning Pharaoh. He doesn't say he's judging and condemning the Egyptian people. God says he is judging and condemning, on the night of Passover, the gods of Egypt, the spirits, the demons who have control of them. St. Paul has read this very closely, right? Now, Pharaoh, what happens? What does Pharaoh's purpose end up being? It ends up being this object lesson for the whole world. It ends up being this cautionary tale for the whole world of what happens when someone thinks they're a God and tries to stand up to the true God, right? Even if he's the absolute ruler of the most powerful nation on Earth. This is, this is what happens. He becomes this cautionary tale, right? What happened to Israel? Again, St. Paul has read the prophets really carefully. What do the prophets keep telling Israel as we're approaching the destruction of the northern kingdom and the Exile of the southern kingdom of Judah? God keeps saying to them through the prophets, "I created you and called you to this purpose of being a light to the nations, that through you I would reveal myself to the nations, my holiness, my purity. You haven't wanted to do that. So what does he say? I'm going to make you an example to the nations of what happens, right, when someone is faithless to the calling I've given them. I'm going to make them an object lesson. I'm going to make them a cautionary tale." Yeah. I mean, just works the same way. So St. Paul is using Pharaoh here, right? Because, keep in mind, right, who's he arguing with? Right? He's arguing with people who are going to say, "Well, St. Paul, you can't be right about Jesus being the Messiah because the rest of the Jews would have all accepted him if he was the Messiah, right? If God keeps his promises, why hasn't he kept his promises to everybody descended from Abraham?" If St. Paul comes and just starts attacking Israel and Israelites and his fellow Jews, that's not going to go anywhere in terms of argument. So what does he do? So he says things about Edom, right? Because any of them who have read the Old Testament, they know about what happened with Edom, right? They go, "Yeah, yeah, that Edom, that happened." But he's saying Israel, or, uh, Judea, right, has become like Edom. He doesn't start talking about Israel. He talks about Pharaoh because they're going to read Exodus. They're like, "Yeah, Pharaoh. Pharaoh was used by God as this object lesson to the nation, this cautionary tale." St. Paul's going to say, "Yeah, and now Judea and the destroyed northern kingdom have, like Pharaoh, they've become this cautionary tale, right, in the purposes of God, because they refused, right?" And in both cases, it's faithlessness that brought this about.

Verse 19. All right, continuing on through chapter nine of Romans. "You will say to me then, 'Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?' But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, 'Why have you made me like this?' Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles?"

Okay, go ahead and stop there before we get to quotes. So we've got the, the lumps for the two different, the two different kinds of vessels, yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, people read this and they say, "See, this is God making, yeah, you know, bad vessels and good vessels, and that's just the way that it is, and you're just clay. Who are you, you know?" So if you go to Jeremiah, if you're familiar with the prophets, see, again, this, you got to be really familiar with the Old Testament to understand what Paul's, St. Paul's doing. Um, you go back and read the Old Testament prophets, especially Jeremiah uses this analogy of the potter and the potter's vessels. It's talking about nations, not talking about individuals, number one. Okay? Number two, this that's translated there is "a vessel for dishonorable use." This is a direct reference St. Paul is making to, to, uh, God saying, uh, it's usually translated, "English: Moab is my washpot." It literally means, "Moab is my toilet." Um, um, Moab, right? So he created Israel for one purpose, he created Moab for a different purpose. Um, dang, right? But again, what is St. Paul arguing about? Okay? What is St. Paul talking about? St. Paul is talking about all those generations, all those thousands and thousands of people descended from Abraham, whose, whose ancestors were part of the Exodus from Egypt, who came and settled in the land. All those people from those northern tribes, right? Who were there for centuries. God brought them into the land, gave them all these blessings, gave them all these things, and in the end, what happened to them? They're gone. They're wiped out. Yeah. Carried off. They're wiped out, right? And what was the point of that? Did God not know? Did God not, right? And St. Paul is saying, "Well, what if, what if God knew full well what those people were like, right? Knew that they were going to end up suffering his wrath, right? Knew that full well, but he decided to also bring them out of Egypt, to also give them land, to also send rain and give them crops and do all these good things for them, knowing full well that they would continue to be faithless and eventually would cut them off, and they would serve as this object lesson to the rest of the world of the cost of faithlessness?" That's the argument St. Paul's making. Would that make God a bad person? Quite the opposite, right? Right. God is giving all these blessings to people who didn't, don't deserve it at all. He's being patient with them when they don't deserve it at all. But then, because he finally comes to the end of his patience, oh, now all of a sudden you're going to accuse him of injustice? Yeah, they got what was coming to them, you know? Right. God waited a long time. He, and again, he's speaking collectively because we know St. Paul's going to quote it here, coming up, yeah. We know that in the time of Elijah, there were thousands of people who had not bowed the knee to Baal in the northern kingdom. It's not every individual in the northern kingdom is a reprobate. It's saying nothing about individuals in the northern kingdom. Prophet Elijah was from the northern kingdom, right? But it's talking about the kingdom as a whole, those people groups, those tribes, right? You're coming and saying, "Oh, God didn't keep his promises to them." And St. Paul's saying, "Oh, yeah, yeah, he did. That's right. He went above and beyond with them, yeah. Before he ultimately used them for the use that he put them to. But until then, he gave them all kinds of undeserved kindness." Right? That's the argument St. Paul's making. Okay. Now we get back to the Hosea. All right, rolling on.

Verse 25. "As indeed he says in Hosea, 'Those who are not my people I will call my people, and her who is not beloved I will call beloved. And in the very place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,' there they will be called sons of the Living God.' And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, 'Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully and without delay.' And as Isaiah predicted, 'If the Lord of hosts had not left us offspring, we would have been like Sodom and become like Gomorrah.'"

"What shall we say then? That the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is a righteousness that is by faith? But that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law? Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone." As it is written, "Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame."

Right, so most of that, I think, is kind of self-explanatory till we get to the end, right? Because then we get this, "Oh, faith versus works thing." Yeah. It's faithfulness, right? Yeah. Um, so first of all, notice St. Paul does not here contest that the law, the Torah, leads to righteousness. Yeah, he's acknowledging that it does, right? But he's saying, "So then, why did we've got Gentiles? We've got people who, we've got non-Jewish people, people from the nations, who are receiving these promises, right? And we've got these Jewish people who had the Torah that leads to righteousness, right? Who haven't received those promises? How does that work, right?" And this is where he makes this contrast between pursuing it by faithfulness or pursuing it by works, specifically works of the Torah. We'll get into that in a second. But the key is, right, he says, "They have stumbled over the stumbling block." Right? And then he has the quote. Who is the stumbling block? It's Christ. It's Christ, yeah. Right. So the faithfulness he's talking about is faithfulness to the Messiah, right? So the core of what he's saying here is, they've rejected the Messiah, right? They've rejected the Messiah. And since they've rejected the Messiah, and he's the firstborn, think Jacob and Esau, think Isaac and his brothers, right? They've cut themselves off from receiving their share of the promises because he's the inheritor of the promises, right? But what is, what have they done in rejecting the Messiah, right? Rather than receiving and being faithful to the Messiah and his commandments, they have sought it through the works of the Torah. Don't have super time to go into this right now. Uh, you can read Matthew Thomas's published dissertation, "Paul and the Works of the Law." But the way everyone in the first three centuries of the church, literally everyone, reads St. Paul means by "works of the law" is Jewish, the the commandments that were specifically given to the Jewish people, like circumcision and kosher. Where did we start in chapter nine? We started in chapter nine with, "Not everyone who's descended from Abraham is really descended from Abraham," right? He's referring back to arguments he made back in chapters three, four, and five about Abraham and his faithfulness. But not everyone descended from is descended from Abraham, right? But Isaac, right? And so everyone else needs to be faithful to Isaac. So the particular works he's talking about, the particular commandment-keepings he's talking about is, "Well, I'm circumcised. I eat the Passover. I do these things. That makes me a child of Abraham. That means I receive a share of the promises, right? By myself, apart from the Messiah. Right? I am a separate inheritor." St. Paul says it doesn't work that way, right? Esau, it didn't work that way for Esau. Esau couldn't just claim a share of the promises apart from Jacob because Jacob's the firstborn. He inherits everything. Esau was circumcised, right? Esau was circumcised. That didn't get him a share. He had to be in this relationship of faithfulness with his brother who was the firstborn, right? Same thing with them. That's the point he's making. He's come back around to his original point. You have to be in this relationship of faithfulness with the Messiah, okay?

Now, a piece of chapter 10. We're not doing all of chapter 10. Yes, there's a bunch of things in there about the Gentile. We've talked about them in other episodes, but we're reading part that sort of pertains to this. Yes. Okay. So chapter 10, starting with verse five. "For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith—let me say faithfulness—the righteousness based on faithfulness says..." I'm reading from the ESV, everyone, by the way. "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?' (that is, to bring Christ down) or 'Who will descend into the abyss?' (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? 'The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart'—that is the word of faithfulness that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, 'Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.' For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

So in verses five and six, or actually five, uh, five through eight, right? Yeah. Uh, our, uh, our 16th-century German friend, Martin Luther, will, uh, croak from his grave that, "Oh, see, look, St. Paul is contrasting. Moses writes about this righteousness is based on the law, based on the Torah, that the person who does the commandments will live by them, but the righteousness based on faith says..." Da da da da da. Right? When St. Paul says in verse six, "But the righteousness based on faith or faithfulness says," right? And then he quotes, he's quoting Deuteronomy. He's literally quoting Moses. This is not a contrast, okay? That, but that, that the English translators put there is confusing. You. He says, "Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them." Right? "And the righteousness based on faith says..." Because he's now going to quote Moses. This is, it's both Moses. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's Moses. And Moses. St. Paul is not contrasting Moses with Moses, I assure you. Yeah. Be like Moses, not like Moses. Uh, that would be a pretty nutty thing to do as a Pharisee, yeah. That, that doesn't make any sense, right? So, "person who does the commandments lives by them." Yes, yes. This is true, right? And you know how I know for sure that that's true? Because like four days ago now, four or five days ago, Sunday, is that four days ago? Is that five days ago now? Anyway, time's a flat circle. Um, uh, I read Christ say exactly that, "Do these things and you will live," about commandments from the Torah. St. Paul is not contradicting Christ, right? And the righteousness that is based on faithfulness says, "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?' or 'Who will descend into the abyss?' The word is near you in your mouth and on your heart." Deuteronomy, right? And if you read that section, it can say, "These things are not too hard for you." The whole point of what's being said in Deuteronomy is that being faithful to the commandments of God is not too hard for you. There's something you could do. I know, I know Martin Luther and generations of Protestants since him have taken this and told you it means the exact opposite of what St. Paul is saying, literally the opposite. They've said that he's contrasting Moses with Moses, and that the second Moses he is reading to mean exactly the opposite of what it very clearly means in Deuteronomy. But that makes no sense. That is on the face wrong. There is no rational way to argue that that's what St. Paul is doing there, just isn't. Okay? And when St. Paul adds his interpretive comments, right, "Who will ascend into heaven?" that is to bring Christ down, meaning we don't need someone to go up into heaven because Christ has come down from heaven to us. We don't need someone to descend into the abyss, into the depths of the earth, because Christ did descend into the depths of the earth when he died and he rose again, right? "The word is near you in your mouth and on your heart." The word of faithfulness, the word of Christ, the Gospel, right? We have it. And being faithful to it, being obedient to it, is not too hard for you. That's what St. Paul is saying, right? Salvation is there, right? And again, they've translated this again, "believe, believe, believe." It's "be faithful." Yeah. It's "be faithful." It's not just think something is true, right? All right. We ready for chapter 11? I think so. Yes.

Romans 11. "I ask then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah how he appeals to God against Israel: 'Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.' But what is God's reply to him? 'I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.' So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace."

Okay, so what's he saying here? As I mentioned, he refers to, to this episode, the life of the Prophet Elijah, right? Um, so he's saying, "Right now, look, it's it's not that all of the Jewish people have fallen away, right? That none of the Jewish people have accepted the Messiah, right?" St. Paul's like, "I mean, I'm an example." But he goes on to say, "Look, just like in Elijah's day," meaning, "just again, just like it's always been," is a core part of his arguments in chapter nine. It's always been this way. It was this way all through the Old Testament, all through the Hebrew Scriptures. It was this way, right? So it shouldn't surprise you that it's this way now, right? All through the Hebrew scriptures, most of Israel was faithless, and there was a faithful remnant, right? And notice that remnant, it says, "chosen by grace," right? Chosen, meaning they have this quality, *charis*, right? They are *chosen*, and that's by grace, by God's action. God's action makes them that way, right? Meaning it's not on the basis of works of the Torah, right? Meaning it's not because, right, these, these are the Jewish people who got circumcised and the other ones didn't, right? The dividing line, the dividing line is the Messiah. It's Jesus. It's what God has done in Christ, right? Him being the Messiah and being faithful to him, that's the dividing line within the Jewish people and within all of the nations, yeah. Right.

Verse seven. "What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, as it is written, 'God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear—down to this very day.' And David says, 'Let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them; let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and bend their backs forever.'"

"So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean?"

Right, so he's saying, he's saying Israel, Israel didn't end up receiving the promises, right? He says, "Well, yeah, right? Those who are elect, those who have this quality, right? Those who, who have, uh, been qualified, they obtained it, and the rest are hardened, right?" So the rest become what? The faithless become what? They become an object lesson, right? They still continue to serve the purposes of God, but it's a different purpose, okay? And what is that purpose? For St. Paul, right? St. Paul makes clear that purpose is not, they're reprobate, they're going to hell. No, it's to bring the nations in, right? It's so that, right, the Gospel goes out to the nations, and then when the nations come in, right, when, uh, the, uh, the rest of the Judeans who haven't accepted the Messiah see the nations coming in to worship the true God, giving up their idols, right? Giving up their immorality, coming to worship the true God. St. Paul says, then they'll be provoked to jealousy, and then they will turn and accept the Messiah, Messiah, right? So that hardening, like Pharaoh's hardening, has nothing to do with salvation, eschatological salvation. It has everything to do with this purpose they're fulfilling, yeah. Right. And St. Paul sees this purpose they're fulfilling now as ultimately being part of their eventual salvation.

Verse 13. "Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Because I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? For if the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches."

Right, so now notice, notice what he says here, right? St. Paul has been called by Christ, right, to go and bring this message of salvation to all the nations so that they will turn from their idolatry, turn from their wickedness, turn to the, come and worship the true God in Jesus the Messiah, right? But he, St. Paul, is here saying that he doesn't see that as an end in itself, right? He thinks that through doing that, he's going to help save his fellow Jews, help them come and find salvation, yeah. There's definitely hope here for for Judea. And if their rejection has meant that, that the gospel has gone out, salvation has gone out to the whole world, he says that eventual acceptance, I mean, that'll bring about the resurrection. Now we're talking about the Messianic age. We're talking about Christ's return. That's what St. Paul's saying, okay? Now he gives this analogy in starting in verse 17 that we referred to earlier.

"But if some of the branches were broken off, and you although a wild olive shoot were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, 'Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.' That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, their unfaithfulness. But you stand fast through faithfulness. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you."

So what for perseverance of the saints? But continue. There you go. "Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God's kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off. And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief or their unfaithfulness, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree?"

Yeah, we already commented on that analogy a bit with the collar, so we can keep going. Yeah, yeah.

"Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written, 'The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob,' and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins."

This is this section here is very important. Um, so there is this reference that St. Paul makes, "until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in." Right? That, again, this partial hardening, meaning those who have rejected Jesus the Messiah, they've been hardened, right? Right. But he, again, he's talking about, well, there will be this time, right, where they'll be provoked to jealousy and come back, right? In the end, that's part of what St. Paul's working for. And that's going to come after the fullness of the Gentiles have come in, yeah. And once the fullness of the Gentiles have come in, then all Israel will be saved, yeah. Yeah. I mean, isn't this a reference to the Testament of Jacob? Yes. Yeah. This is a reference to Genesis chapter 48. "Fullness of the Gentiles." Again, you got to be really familiar with the Torah to understand St. Paul. Yeah, he's using phrases that if you know the Torah super well, like, "Oh, oh, oh, I caught that reference," yeah, you know. Um, so in Genesis 48, Joseph brings his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, to Jacob, his father, for him to bless his sons. And these are going to be the two half-tribes, right? And Ephraim is the younger of the two, okay? But Ephraim is going to be the numerically largest and most powerful tribe of the northern kingdom, yeah. Throughout the prophets, the Psalms, yeah. So much so that the northern kingdom gets called Ephraim, right? In the Psalms and the prophets, it's referred to as Ephraim, like we said before, there's Ephraim and there's Judah, right? Right. That's the way of referring to the two kingdoms. Um, and so, as we see so many times in Genesis, even though Ephraim is the younger, Jacob crosses his left and right hands, so he puts his right hand on Ephraim when he blesses him, right? Gives him the older brother blessing. Joseph tries to correct him, and, uh, Jacob's like, "No, no, the thing." And what does he say to Ephraim? He says, "Your offspring will become the fullness of the Gentiles," yeah. Which, the fullness of the nations, a reference to the northern kingdom being carried off, being dissolved, and dissolved into the nations, right? So the idea then is that when the nations come to worship Israel's God, it's the return of Ephraim, effectively, cu the promise over and over again in the prophets is that all Israel will be saved. Ephraim and Judah will be bound back together. All the tribes, all Israel will be saved, right? And so St. Paul, what St. Paul sees, and St. Paul isn't making this up, this is referred to, go back to our episode on the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, this is an idea in second temple Judaism before St. Paul gets to it, uh, that through the dissolution of the northern tribes into the nations, right, the nations would come back in and be grafted in to fill all those spots where those branches were cut off, yeah. So the way all Israel is saved, the way the whole 12 tribes is saved, is by the people of the nations coming in and taking, taking the place of those tribes. That's exactly what St. Paul is saying here, and it's clear, again, if you know the Torah, that he's referring to, yeah.

Okay, finish this out here. Okay, and we'll finally finish the second half. Almost two hours in. Okay, almost three hours. Who endures to the end will be saved. Yeah. Thank you very much for that.

"As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. The 'they' here, by the way, is is Israel, because he's talking to the Gentiles now, right? As regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God, but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. Kind of goes around, comes around. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen."

You just want to end the second half there, or do you have anything you want to say about that? Yeah, you want to step on St. Paul's climax there? I guess I don't know. I mean, good. Go. Yeah. But I love what he does here, right? He's like saying, it's it's going back and forth. Like he's like saying, "Okay, so Israel is in this sorry state so that you Gentiles could be brought in. But when they see, when Israel sees you being brought in, they're going to want to get on board as well, right?" You know? So it's, there's a lot of falls going on here, but it's, there's going to be a lot of getting up as a result. Yep. Yep. All right. Well, that wraps up the second half. We have one more half to go on this very special election episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast. So we'll be right back. Father Andrew Steven Dyk and Father Stephen D Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of The Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF [Music] radio. How do you explain the sacraments? It's easy to say they're mysteries that we have to take on faith or on the authority of tradition. But that is not how the early Christians understood them. To them, and to all ancient people, the idea that physical objects had spiritual power was very intuitive. Whereas modern people tend to find this difficult, bizarre, or even unchristian. This is because we live in an era shaped by secularism, a way of viewing a world that's incompatible with sacramental thinking. Because secular ideas are at the heart of our culture, modern people tend to think in secular ways without realizing it, even the most well-meaning of us. How then do we live in, but not be of, a secular culture? We need to understand the enchanted, sacramental way that the early Christians viewed the world. But we also need to understand secularism. What is it really? Where did it come from? And how does it influence how we think about religion? Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age breaks down these important issues in accessible, non-academic language and is an ideal introduction for young readers, catechumens, and seekers, as well as for any Orthodox Christians who want to deepen their understanding of the sacraments. Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age by Zachary Porubsky, now available at store.ancientfaith.com. Again, that is store.ancientfaith.com. We're back now with The Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Steven Dyk and Father Stephen D Young. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio. So I know the voice of Steve just told you to call everybody, but, um, we're actually closed down the phone lines, simply because it has already been a nice beefy episode. And we have more. Cowardice. I know, I know, I know. It's true. What can I say? Uh, but, you know, it all comes down, when does Father Andrew get to go to sleep? So you thought you were going to find out the results of the election and not have to stay up late? I mean, I just keep hoping for 1984 all over again, where it was like over at 8 p.m. Something like that. 49 states. All I know, I remember that. That was the first, that was the first election that I remember staying up for. Um, yeah, you know, I remember as a kid, as a little kid, just feeling really bad for Walter Mondale. I know, like, oh man, that's like, I mean, you know, I was nine, but it was like, that's like getting, you know, picked last for dodgeball, 50 times. 49 times. 49 times, yeah. Like, poor guy. But Minnesota said, "We want you, Walter Mondale." Like, "We want you." He was the second best politician in the country at the time, you know. But no respect. Yeah. Okay. Uh, sorry, Calvinists. Yes. It's the, that's no connection to Walter Mondale, by the way. We're not implying that Walter Mondale was a Calvinist. I, I don't know what his theology was. Calvinists are in some way like Walter Mondale, or even there are many Calvinists in Minnesota. I don't know. Yes, many have voted. One was chosen. I don't know. But, uh, yes, yes. No, this is just the episode where we just have to say that it's required by, in our contract, to say that at the beginning of each, each half. So, yes, we are, we are being a little, uh, pugnacious. Uh, yes. So how about in, in Matthew 22, where it says, "Many are called, but few are chosen"? Yeah. So we're going to be, fortunately for Father Andrew, you know, he went and got the early bird dinner at 3 p.m. at the local Bob Evans. He's an elderly man now. He needs to go to sleep. Slightly younger than you. We're going to try and pull all this together. You don't ever sleep. So, yeah. So I wait. So, yeah. So, um, yes, Matthew 22:14 says, "Many are called, but few are chosen." Right? And, uh, what's interesting, and the reason we're bringing this up here now in our third half, is that if you go back to, and I know it's been a long time since we were at the beginning of the second half, but Romans 8:30, it talks about, "Those whom he predestined he also called. Those whom he called he also justified. Those whom he justified he also glorified." If you look up patristic commentary on Romans 8:30, the Church Fathers aren't concerned about any golden chains of redemption or any of that kind of stuff, or predestinarianism. What they're concerned about is, "Wait, doesn't this contradict Matthew 20:14, that many are called, but few are chosen?" Yeah. By the way, I just have to say, cuz I just had to look this up, Walter Mondale was, in fact, a Presbyterian. Wow. So it all comes together, right? Sorry, Walter Mondale, about 1984, and your Calvinism. Uh, he probably PCUSA, though. I mean, yeah, probably. I don't know. Are they really Calvinists? Are they really Calvinist? At some point, they might have been. I, I don't know. Not anymore, that's for sure. Or actually, he would have been. He was probably most of his life. He's probably United Presbyterian before they got back together. His dad was a Methodist minister, apparently. So, oh, well, then.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Anyway, okay, sorry, sorry. I know, I know. I just had looked that up, like, what religion was Walter Mandu? I wonder if him joining a Calvinist denomination after having, like, a Wesleyan dad was, like, youthful rebellion in Minnesota. Oh, son, I'll show you. I'm gonna become a Pres- dang, Arminian.

Anyway, okay. Um, so, so, yeah, the fathers, when they're really rans, 8:30, right? Because, of course, as we said, they're reading it, you know, frankly, the way we did, uh, at the beginning of chapter 2. It's saying, well, St. Paul is saying, if he does one of these things, he does all of these things, right? And this says, if he, if, if he calls you, he does all these things. But Matthew 22:14 says, "Many are called, but few are chosen." That makes it sound like you could be called by God, and he doesn't do those other things, right? Uh, isn't that a contradiction?

But here's what they point out. Matthew 22:14, "Many are called, but few are chosen," is the end of a parable that Christ tells, yeah? In the preceding verses of Matthew 22, parable of the Wedding Banquet, with the guy who shows up without a wedding garment, right? Yep. And so, right, many are called, meaning lots and lots of people were invited to the wedding. This guy shows up without the garment, right? He's not chosen. Yeah. The parable doesn't go that the king who offers the banquet goes around all his wedding guests and says, "I choose you, I choose you, I choose you, I don't choose you, guy without a wedding garment." Yeah, no. He, he, or show, or even show me your invitation, like some of you showed up uninvited, right? Right. No, that was, I only chose to invite some of you. Yeah, yeah. It was a choice. You know, if, if there's choosing going on, it's the guy who showed up without the garment who made that choice, right? But he doesn't have this status of chosen. And chosen here has to do with showing up in the wedding garment, meaning it's an issue of qualification, yeah? It's an issue of having qualified yourself, right? Uh, in terms of that call, right? So the call was, what? You are invited to a wedding feast. What is the faithful way to answer that call? To go and purchase a wedding garment, put it on, and arrive in a timely manner to the wedding feast, yeah? Right. So he's faithless. He doesn't do what he was supposed to do, right? And so he doesn't receive the promise that lay behind that call, right?

So in Romans, St. Paul is talking about, look, God is going to follow through. God is going to be faithful. The question is whether we're going to be faithful, right? To the call, not whether God's going to be faithful to his promises, right?

Another very important passage, uh, Second Peter 1:5-11. This one's going to sting Calvinists for this very reason. "Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. But if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election." Or as it says in the good old King James, "make your calling and election sure." For if you practice these qualities, you will never fail. For in this way, there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Right? Yeah. It's interesting that he says, "If you do this, that's going to give you the entrance." Yes. This is not about what happens after you're in. Yeah, yeah. This is about entering into the kingdom, right? So if you want to enter into the kingdom, right? That's the promise, right? You've been called to. That's what you've been called to. You've been called to the kingdom of God. So in order to receive that promise, you have to make your calling and election sure. That means your election isn't sure. Yeah, it isn't certain. This is the Bible. That's what it says. Yeah. You got to work out your salvation with fear. And it isn't sure. Okay. Uh, and this is not about, as I've heard certain Calvinists, and this is a bad argument, so don't make this argument, Calvinist, but I've heard some people say this. This is not about making you sure about your salvation. Yeah. I, I just don't feel sure because it doesn't say that. It doesn't. This is not psychology. This is not about psychology. This is making your calling and election sure, right? Yeah. And how do you do that? Back to verse five. You make every effort. That's working. That's doing things. You can't get around that. Make every effort, yeah, to supplement your faithfulness with virtue, and virtuous knowledge. Each of these things, because if you have those qualities, which you, you gain those qualities, those qualifications that constitute your election and make it get sure, you gain those qualities through effort. If you have them through that effort, and if they're increasing through that effort, they keep you from being ineffectual or unfruitful. And therefore, your calling and election is made sure, and you gain an entrance into the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what St. Peter says there. That's simply what it says. Yep.

Now, I know, right? I know there are some Calvinist folks out there who will come and say, "That's a really hard passage. It's really unclear. We need to interpret the unclear passages like this based on the clear passages." And I'm going to say, the clear passages, like what? Like Romans 9? We just went through that. Romans 8, 10, 11, right? The passages you typically say are clear, don't clearly say what you need them to say. And therefore, you can't sort of use them to try and jimmy and squelch what this one clearly says, because this text is actually really clear. The difference between clear and difficult is not "agrees with me" versus "disagrees with me." Oh, man. Right?

So the issue here, here, right, is about qualifying or not qualifying through the acquisition of virtue, through the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, which is done through faithfulness, which includes effort. Uh, so Israel, historically, the story of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the Old Testament, is that Israel proved, by and large, not everyone, right? Now, again, we're not talking about every individual, because there's this remnant, always, in every generation, great saints of the Old Covenant. But on the whole, the nation of Israel was unfaithful and failed to live up to its calling to serve as a light to the nations. But St. Paul says that calling remains, because the calling is irrevocable. So we heard at the end of, uh, Romans 11, right? The nations have been called to worship the true God, right? That's a calling that comes out of Israel. Salvation is from the Jews, Jesus says, right? But now the church, constituted primarily of Gentiles, has an inverse calling to Israel's original calling. We're now called to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy, to get them to return to God's Messiah. Yeah. What does that mean? That means Jewish people should look at their Christian friends and neighbors, see the holiness we practice, see the righteousness we practice, so we've given up evil things, see how we follow the true God, and that should inspire them to accept Jesus as their Messiah. Allow me to say that collectively, we're talking about everyone in history who has called themselves a Christian, we haven't done that. Yeah. Right? Your average Jewish person, if they go back through history and look at people who have called themselves Christians and the way they've acted, not just toward Jewish people, but just in general, right? Uh, would not be struck by our holiness and kindness and gentleness and love. Okay. Now, obviously, we can only control ourselves in our own communities, right? Our own, right? But this is, and beyond just the question of the Jewish people, I mean, that's the context in which St. Paul's talking about it in Romans, right? So that's why we refer to it here. But in general, right, this is, I have people all the time who come and join the Orthodox Church, and they have family members, sometimes their spouse, right? Sometimes older children of theirs, other family members, right? Who sometimes are antagonistic to the Orthodox Church, sometimes they're just not interested, sometimes they have quals, whatever their relationship is, they're not ready to join. Likewise, right? And what I tell all those people when they're joining the Orthodox Church is, all those other people in your life are going to be looking at you, and they're going to see how you live and what you do, and if and how being part of the Orthodox Church changes your life, what kind of holiness, what kind of fruit it brings out in you. And if they see good fruit there, if they see these good things happening for you, that will draw them into the church, not you arguing with them, not you sending them memes, them seeing you living a Christian life, right? So we're not just talking about Jewish people, we're talking about everyone in the world, right? Should be able to look at us and our lives, the way we live them, as a person, and collectively as a community, the way we live as a church, should be able to look at that and see Christ there and be drawn to it, right? That's our calling. It's kind of our calling as Israel. And so for St. Paul, the way we find salvation, it's not just St. Paul, this is all of the Apostles, all of the New Testament writers, right? This is really very simple. It's not really that hard, right? God has given us a calling. He's given us a general calling as Christians, right? There's a Christian way of life in community, right? That we believe has been preserved in the Orthodox Church, right? If nowhere else, it has been preserved in the Orthodox Church. We don't need to comment on where else somebody else might find it, but it's definitely here. Uh, that way of life leads to salvation. We're called to live in that way. We find our salvation by being faithful to it. But there's also another layer. There's a very personal layer. It's not all collective, yeah? Right? So there's a way every Christian should live. There are things, you know, love one another. There are commandments that are to all of us, right? But there are also, for St. Paul and for all the other New Testament writers, particular gifts and particular callings that God has given to you, yeah? Different people, different people have different abilities, different gifts, different talents. You know, we're not all good at everything, yeah? And so we're called to fill different roles in our families, in our communities, in our parish communities, church communities, right? We're called to different roles based on having these different gifts, right? And spiritual gifts are not about babbling incoherently or, uh, jumping up and down or working miracles or predicting the future, okay? Spiritual gifts are, according to the Bible, more about, uh, some people being able to paint icons, some people being able to teach, some people being good at cleaning, yeah, administration, some people being good at sewing things for the church, some people being good at baking bread for the Eucharist, some people, right, being good at preparing food for the community to eat and have fellowship, right? All kinds of things, right? You know, I'm, I'm really blessed in my parish in that I have a bunch of people who have trades who could do things like electric and plumbing and things, right? That's a spiritual gift too, right? That you can offer back to God, right? In the spirit. And so we find salvation very simply by being faithful to those callings in our life. And we risk salvation, we risk that when we're faithless to that calling, when we abandon that calling that God has given us. It's really, it's really that simple. Yeah.

So I know some of you people in the YouTube chat were cheering for a four-hour episode. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe Father Stephen will give us 45 minutes at the end. Uh, I did used to preach in Protestant churches. It's true. I know. I mean, the sermons I grew up with were 45 to 60 minutes typically, and often went longer. Um, yeah. Okay. So, yes, this episode is a whole lot of, "Sorry, Calvinists," but its purpose is not actually just an apologetic against Calvinism, right? There is actual positive content to what it means to be elect, slash chosen. Um, and I think that a lot of this gets distorted, confused, misunderstood because of the particular currents swirling around at the time of the Reformation, which is when a lot of the stuff gets, gets, um, you know, gets the articulation that most of us are now familiar with. And maybe even this is the way we just tend to read the Bible because this is what we were trained in or whatever. Um, and I think one of the, I mean, it's well known, for instance, that, um, like we could talk about the personality and experience and life story of people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, you know, and and that's very interesting, but I'm not going to sort of locate everything in that, um, although I think that's that's an interesting, uh, trail to to walk down and look into it, you know. Um, but also, I mean, there's one of the things going on around the Reformation, and a lot of people don't realize this, is that there was a strong sense that, um, amongst a lot of Christians in Western Europe, that the end of the world was coming and soon, right? There was a lot of millenarianism. There was a sense that they were really living in the end times. And, you know, thus they were able to look at the Roman Catholic Church and they would say, "This is the final apostasy. The Pope is the Antichrist." And by that, they didn't just mean that all Popes are antichrists, but like, they actually believed like he was the last one, you know, this was it. And so as a result, then for a lot of people, the Reformation was a sense of this final sort of push of the Gospel, a final, um, cleansing, you know, of Christianity before the return of Christ. Okay. And and therefore, if you have this sense of like imminent return, then the question of "How do I know that I'm saved?" has a really, uh, heightened character to it, you know? And if you do have a a neurotic personality, which I'm going to go ahead and say that Martin Luther seemed to have one, then, you know, you might do things like go to confession multiple times a day and agonize over whether you truly are saved, which he did. He did. But he's not the only one who, you know, who has those kinds of feelings. Um, you know, with that sense that the world is ending, and then a lot of very, very heightened emotional states can come around. And then that has can have theological ramifications, especially if you happen to have a bunch of political rulers willing to give you space to explore other kinds of theology than the ones that had been dominant for countries in your region, right?

So what does that have to do with us today? Well, I mean, there are a lot of people that feel like we're in the end times. I mean, we, we did a whole series of episodes on eschatology, you know. Uh, if you haven't listened to them, well, spoiler alert, we've been in the end times for 2,000 years. So, you know, I'm not saying this isn't the end of the end. I mean, who knows? I might not wake up tomorrow. It might be the end of the world. It might be just the end of my world. I don't know, you know. Eschatology is always, always nearby. We're always participating in that in the end of the world in one way or another. But I think there is a sense that a lot of people have now that like, okay, this is, this is really bad, you know, the way that the world is right now. And and honestly, even though we've made a number of like political election jokes in the course of this episode, some, sometimes the way that politics moves makes people feel like it's the end of the world, or at least that it's going to be the end of their world. Um, you know, I, I'm now, I mean, we both made reference to, uh, the 1984 presidential election. That's the first election that I remember. I was, I was nine years old when that went down. Father Stephen was the same age as I am, but a couple months more. Um, and so I, I remember a lot of elections. And especially I remember a number. For a while there are people that that feel like, "Oh, the Antichrist just got elected." Literally. I recall for the last five or six presidential elections, people saying that, you know. Um, this sense of the end of the world in one way or another, because they believe that whoever got just got elected is the worst possible person that could be elected, you know, and they're going to bring everything down, you know? And there are people who are even, uh, I've even seen this again, just in the last week, people saying that they're going to kill themselves because of the way that an election turned out, because of the sense of, "The world is ending. My world is ending." At the very least. And my point in all this is not to make a comment about politics in the church, by no means. Although honestly, I think we need to hold all of these things going on in the world a lot more lightly. That doesn't mean they're not serious, they are serious. But what's more serious is the big story, and that's the story of Christ. It's more serious, right? And so this question of "How do I know that I am saved?" This is a kind of a, it is kind of a neurotic question, right? I'm not saying it's bad to ask that question, but it, especially if you, if you keep returning to it and you obsess over it, you need to come up with a system for it, then it is kind of a neurotic thing to to to focus on, you know, to make the definition of your theology, for instance. Um, you know, it would be like a husband and wife where every day, you know, let's say I go to my wife every day and saying, "No, I need you to tell me again that you're not going to divorce me." And how I know I'm not going to divorce you. I mean, what does that do to a marriage when that's what it's about? Um, it's not in good shape that relationship, right? So what does it come down to? It comes down to what St. Paul says. It comes down to, it comes down to faithfulness. Faithfulness, right? Not absolute mental certainty. Faithfulness, like this is my life, the life in Christ, right? It is a way of of acting, a way of being, a way of thinking, um, a way of loving, like all of these things, you know? It's, it's an in, it's ongoing because there, it's, it's all of these very active verbs of things that you do. And, you know, day one of of when you've chosen to be faithful to Christ, you, you listen to the call and you're trying to to do the thing. Day one, you know, you've just begun. You've just begun. And it's okay if you're worried. It's okay if you're like, "I don't know if I'm doing this right." That's all right. It's okay. It's okay. You're going to fall down a gazillion times. Just make sure you get up a gazillion and one, okay? Just stay loyal, you know? Um, you know, it makes me think of the words of the great philosopher, you know, "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down." Um, you know, the point is loyalty and faithfulness and continuing on and on. And so, um, yeah, it, it, it doesn't need to be this neurotic thing. You don't need to have some kind of signed contract. You don't need to. If you're just simply living this life together, right? Like marriages can become very neurotic as a result of this, but friendships tend to be less so. I'm not saying no friendships are neurotic, but people tend to expect less from their friends than they do from their spouse. And so as a result, there's a lot more breathing room, you know? A good marriage is one where there's plenty of breathing room, and they stay together, right? And so, you know, we all want a lot of this language in scripture about the, you know, Christ the bridegroom, and we're the bride of Christ, and we want that kind of intimacy in our spiritual life, and that's awesome and good. But you build that intimacy by this mutual freedom and love for one another, right? And so I think in many cases, we need to start with thinking about what it means that Christ is also our friend, and how do we be his friends? And then that can develop over time. So, yeah, that's what I have to say about that.

So is that Rickroll a reference to your co-host? It's true. He's a living Rickroll. All right, C-tier co-host confirmed. All right. Um, so Landsman, you're B-tier. Congrats. Anyway, wow. So, wow. Gauntlet thrown. So, yeah, so there's, there's a meme that's been going around for a long time. I don't know if I've seen it recently, but I'm sure it's still out there, that that Orthodoxy is Christianity only harder. Oh, I hate that. I hate that. I'm sorry. I just had to jump in and say, I hate that. Well, that's revenge for that Aquinas thing earlier. Oh. Um, so there is some truth to it, in that, right? Of course, Christ says, you know, "Broad is the way and easy is the path that leads to destruction, right? Narrow is the way and straight is the path that leads to that leads to life, right?" But I think, I think sometimes, rather than taking that, or hearing that, or hearing that meme about Orthodox Christianity and being sort of challenged by it in a way that's sort of invigorating and challenging, and let's rise to the occasion, let's take our faith seriously, let's make every effort, as St. Peter says, right? Let's, let's get down to business. Uh, I think a lot of the time we just kind of go, "Man, this is, this is hard. This is too hard." Right? And we look at, we put in front of ourselves as examples of faithfulness, you know, even if we're like, a married person, especially you married folks with kids, and you put in front of yourself as your, your image of the the Christian you're supposed to be, like a sainted monastic who's living a different kind of life than yours, who had a different calling from God than you have. And we look at, because we've chosen that particular model, we compare ourselves to it and just constantly see our deficiency, right? And just constantly see like, "How far away are we from where we should be?" When that shows us our sins, it's good. But what makes it good is not that we wallow in our sins or feel guilty or feel bad. Guilt is worthless, like most emotions. I know I'm gen X, but still. The reason seeing our sins is good is that we can repent of them. We can isolate them. We can go to war with them. We can do better. Again, we could be spurred on to try and do better, to try to fix what we've broken, to try to be healed, and to help with the healing of others, right?

So I want to come back to what St. Paul quoted, which is in Deuteronomy. And in Deuteronomy, it's talking about the whole Torah, the whole Torah, all those commandments, hundreds of commandments. God says, "What do not say, 'Who will go up into heaven? Who will go down to the abyss?' It's not far from you. It's in your mouth. It's on your heart. It's not too hard for you, right?" God wants us to find salvation. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation. He does not want you to perish. He is not trying to make it difficult on you. He's not trying to weed you out of the kingdom. He's not trying to make sure you don't make it. He wants you to make it because he wants you to make it because he loves you. He's given you everything you need to work out your salvation. You have everything you need. We just need to start exerting every effort. We just need to start working toward it. And the reason we're able to do that, the reason we're able to go through whatever suffering and difficulty and hardship we're going through and press on and keep making that effort is that we know what St. Paul also told us, that we read tonight, right? That regardless of that, God is going to be faithful. God is going to finish what he started in us if we remain faithful. He is going to bring us home if we remain faithful. He will continue to provide us with what we need. So any view of God or of holiness or of salvation, no matter how dressed up in a cassock with a giant prayer rope, that causes you to fall into despair is not an image of God or an image of holiness. It's an image of the devil because it's an image of condemnation directed toward you. It's an image of discouragement directed toward you. It's trying to bring you down into despondency. That's not from God. God is with you. He's on your side. The Holy Spirit is in your mouth and on your heart. It's written the commandments there so that if we're willing to follow him, we can keep them and we can find life. That's what I have to say. Amen.

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