Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Lee Brainard: Apostasia - Rapture Or Rebellion?
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to World View Matters, discussing controversial issues, discerning current events,
- 0:10defending biblical Christianity, no topic, off limits.
- 0:16And now, here's your host, David Firazzo.
- 0:20Brothers and sisters in Christ, thank you for tuning in to another episode.
- 0:23I have another great topic that we're going to talk about, but first I want to remind
- 0:28you again, I've been reminding you, over at the World View Matters YouTube channel, we
- 0:35just did a conference a few weeks ago and now all the sessions are up there from the World
- 0:39View Matters Conference kicking off with Alex Newman and other amazing men and women of
- 0:45God. They're all up there, even I believe even the speaker panels, the Q&As, they're up
- 0:50there as well.
- 0:51If you want to go check those out again, World View Matters, David Firazzo.
- 0:56There it is, the conference speakers, the sessions are up.
- 1:00It's free.
- 1:01It won't cost you anything and it'll bless you and help equip you.
- 1:05So check those out if you get a chance.
- 1:07So my brother Lee Brandard is back with us today and the website is soothekeep.info, soothekeep.info.
- 1:16He is also over on the substack, which many people are joining, so that's a good place
- 1:21to get the latest from Lee as well.
- 1:23But there's a brand new book.
- 1:25It's actually a revision.
- 1:26I'll let him explain all that and why called apostasyah in 2nd Thessalonians 2,3, rapture
- 1:36or apostasy.
- 1:37Well, let's talk about that.
- 1:40We haven't talked about that in quite some time, so it's a great topic.
- 1:43Lee, good to see you again.
- 1:44Thanks for your time today, brother.
- 1:47David, it's great to be with you on World View Matters.
- 1:50Yep, I've been seeing you at other conferences and speaking and good to see the books come
- 1:55out.
- 1:56In fact, it's out fully now just when we were recording this, it just came out so people
- 2:01can get it on Amazon, apostasyah, just look up Lee Brandard.
- 2:06So I'll start with the first question.
- 2:09You already wrote something about this topic, but felt it necessary to add information
- 2:15or revise the book and put it out again, and it's all about the meaning of one word.
- 2:21So why?
- 2:22Well, first of all, just why we'd even take up this subject is that obviously this is
- 2:31not the gospel, it's not a foundational issue of Christianity, and it's not even one
- 2:36of the core points of dispensationalism.
- 2:39However, it's a good example to illustrate the historical grammatical hermeneutic, the
- 2:44right approach to interpreting the Bible.
- 2:47It's a great example to illustrate the scientific method.
- 2:50Are we going to take a small pile of evidence, selective use of evidence, and ignore the
- 2:56big pile of evidence?
- 2:58Are we going to use the historical grammatical hermeneutic, which takes everything on the
- 3:02subject in one pile and digest it all?
- 3:06Are we going to take a superstitious hermeneutic, which takes a little bit of evidence, and
- 3:10this is the hermeneutic they use for the flat earth.
- 3:12These are hermeneutic they use for the King James only.
- 3:15That's really the foundational issue, and that's why I would address this question.
- 3:20Now why did I do a revision of it?
- 3:23People ask me, well, brother, you did this whole book and told us what apostasy isn't,
- 3:30but you didn't really tell us what it is.
- 3:32So I, a brand new chapter that addresses what apostasy is.
- 3:37It's the apostasy that's instigated by the Antichrist in the tribulation.
- 3:43So I think it's going to be a very clear book.
- 3:46It's a very easy read, and the chapters are bite-sized.
- 3:51I think this is a good time to point out that if you go to Second Thessalonians or any book
- 3:56in the Bible, but for our context, big word context today, it's Second Thessalonians,
- 4:03or two, there are no numbers.
- 4:06When these letters were written to the churches, when the Bible was written, there were no chapters,
- 4:10numbers, or no numbers to verses, so everything's got to be in context.
- 4:14Is that helpful to put it that way, Lee?
- 4:17I think so.
- 4:18I think we need to understand that we don't want to be leaning on artificial crutches
- 4:23that were not added for bad reasons, added for good reasons, but we can't lean on them
- 4:30like they were divinely inspired.
- 4:33So if you just read through this whole thing, the context starts to be eating a chapter
- 4:37one, and it's on the day of the Lord, you come to Second Thessalonians 2, 3, and we have
- 4:43that section of verse 1, to verse 3, is giving us a little blessing that we are not going
- 4:49to be going through the day of the Lord.
- 4:51We're going to be going up before the day of the Lord, and then he reverts back to the
- 4:56subject of the day of the Lord, coming at it from the donning of the day of the Lord,
- 5:01or the tribulation, which is the time of the Antichrist.
- 5:05And so we've got the rapture right in between chapter 1 and chapter 2.
- 5:10We have a small island of hope in the middle of the day of the Lord context.
- 5:15So the main controversy is the apostasyah and the rapture, correct?
- 5:22Yes.
- 5:23So there are people that say that the King James reading, except the falling away come
- 5:28first, is incorrect.
- 5:31It's begging the question.
- 5:33It's saying that we know for a fact it's apostasy, they want us to read departure.
- 5:39So it should, they're saying it should say, except the departure come first, then you
- 5:44take the word departure and you look at the context and you decide, is this a physical
- 5:48departure, like physically departing the earth in the rapture, or is it a spiritual departure?
- 5:54And it sounds reasonable and plausible when you first hear it.
- 5:58And that's what the purpose of this book was to show that you can have an answer that
- 6:03sounds good, but the facts don't substantiate it.
- 6:07Okay.
- 6:08So the main arguments and then the shortcomings, what are the shortcomings of the main
- 6:14arguments for the rapture view of apostasyah?
- 6:18Well, the main arguments are going to use for the rapture view is they'll look at the
- 6:22older English versions, which many of them use the word departure.
- 6:26And they'll say, see, they meant physical departure.
- 6:30And then they will make the claim that the Greek word apostasyah actually meant departure
- 6:36too.
- 6:37And they will quote the second entry in the little in Scott lexicon, which gives the
- 6:41word departure.
- 6:43And so this sounds actually pretty good.
- 6:45And you go, wow, when I, when I first heard this theory, I thought, boy, I hope this
- 6:49is true.
- 6:50This is pretty amazing.
- 6:51But I had a gut feeling simply because I've been reading quite a week for four decades.
- 6:56It didn't sound right.
- 6:58And when I came to my investigation, I discovered that this argument really has a lot of weaknesses.
- 7:03First of all, it's simply not true that all of the early versions use the word departure.
- 7:09If you look at a critical edition of Wycliffe's Bible, for instance, the foreshall and maddened
- 7:15edition, you'll discover that most of the early manuscripts used the word dissension,
- 7:21which is the same thing as a falling away or a falling apart.
- 7:26And some of them use dissension and departure right next to each other, one of them first
- 7:34and the other in brackets, indicating they regard them as synonyms.
- 7:38In fact, this reading goes all the way back, exubstantiated back to 1300 long before Wycliffe.
- 7:45So that's arguments not true.
- 7:49But also, if you look at these English Bibles, you discover something amazing.
- 7:53The commenters in the Bible, the editors, in the introductions to Second Thessalonians,
- 8:00in the preface, the Second Thessalonians chapter 2, in the marginal notes, in the foot notes,
- 8:05continually pointed out that they believed that this was a departure from the faith, and
- 8:10it was a synonym with falling away in apostasy.
- 8:13Wow.
- 8:15Wow, this goes so beyond just a simple version or translation of the Bible when you talk
- 8:19about editors and commentaries, and especially when you mentioned the New King James,
- 8:24but go back to something from it.
- 8:25You mentioned the little in Scott.
- 8:28Why is the little in Scott entry so misunderstood?
- 8:33Why tell us about that?
- 8:34Because I'm not familiar with with with with the little in Scott lexicon is anyone that's
- 8:40a serious Greek student is going to have one on their shelf.
- 8:43Even if they only use it once or twice a year, it's a massive poem.
- 8:49It's a classical lexicon.
- 8:51So it does have coin A stuff in it and New Testament and Petristic stuff, but it's trying
- 8:56to be an exhaustive lexicon of all the classical literature, so say from Aristotle Herodotus
- 9:02area earlier.
- 9:04But it's very useful.
- 9:06When you look up the word apostasia and you go to the second entry, it gives the reading
- 9:10departure.
- 9:12But what's really interesting about this is let me pull this information up here.
- 9:18Sure.
- 9:19The second entry says departure, disappearance, and then it's Olympiadorus in Aristotle's
- 9:31meteora commentary.
- 9:32In other words, it's in Aristotle's commentary on meteors.
- 9:38And if you look at the context, it's talking about it's a scientific work.
- 9:43So it's the wrong genre.
- 9:44It's not religious.
- 9:46And it's in the sixth century.
- 9:48So it's five centuries too late to regard it as is significant for the New Testament.
- 9:53And it's the context is the evaporation of liquids from solids when heat is applied.
- 10:01And so the departure is evaporation.
- 10:04It's a scientific sense.
- 10:06So it's five centuries too late.
- 10:08It's in a scientific context.
- 10:10And it's evaporation has nothing to do with physical departure of human beings from
- 10:14point A to point B.
- 10:16Wow.
- 10:17Not many people, I mean, I think before we got on the podcast, you were saying a lot of
- 10:21people have written on this topic, but have defined this in a different way.
- 10:25And that's why you're clarifying, which is why your book is important, the use of apostasia.
- 10:31So you say that from 250 BC to AD 500, that's 750 years from 250 BC to AD 500 never used,
- 10:48the word was never used for physical departure.
- 10:51Do I understand that?
- 10:52That's right.
- 10:53Yeah, that's exactly right.
- 10:54So when I decided to investigate this, I don't like to come to an issue like this and
- 11:01just spend five hours reading one side, five hours reading the other side, flip a coin
- 11:06decide who I think is right or say, well, I like preacher A better than preacher B, which
- 11:12is the way so many people resolve a controversy.
- 11:15Yeah.
- 11:16I decided I'm going to get to the bottom of this.
- 11:18I'm going to go right to the horse's mouth.
- 11:20And I decided to look at every instance of apostasia from its first instance, all the
- 11:25way to 500 AD.
- 11:27It took me two years of research.
- 11:29I looked at 283 passages in coin a Greek read them in their context and translated about
- 11:3840% of these passages into English because they didn't have existing English translations.
- 11:45And I found English translations for about 60% of them.
- 11:49The body of the book is only about 120 pages.
- 11:52I have about 260 pages or 280 pages of technical footnotes and dependencies.
- 12:00All that information is there.
- 12:02But from Archimedes, work the sand reckiner in 250 BC give or take a few years until 8500.
- 12:11There were zero instances of apostasia being used in the sense of physical departure.
- 12:17It had a handful of technical senses which were rare because the technical senses were
- 12:22usually taken care of by the Greek word apostasis.
- 12:25So there was one use in the sense of distance, which was Archimedes himself and it was never
- 12:32used in that sense again for the rest of Greek history.
- 12:36Then we have 13 times it was used in the medical sense of an abscess.
- 12:41It was used a few times in the sense of divorce which was normally covered by the Greek
- 12:48word apostasy on.
- 12:49The rest of the time, 7% of the time I think it was.
- 12:54It was used for political rebellion and 93% of the time.
- 13:01It was used for religious rebellion or rebellion against God.
- 13:06So it was never used for physical departure.
- 13:09The technical senses don't apply.
- 13:11So right here, the 93% chance based on its usage over 750 years, 93% chance without even
- 13:19looking at the context that it's spiritual rebellion.
- 13:24Wow.
- 13:25This is really interesting and far back as you go, it's really amazingly you brainiac.
- 13:34So you said something in the notes here.
- 13:37It says apostasia used with active slash middle reference, not passive.
- 13:43And then you said men commit apostasy.
- 13:47The rapture is men being taken by God to heaven.
- 13:52Why is that important?
- 13:54Well, when you look at all the uses of apostasia when it's actually being used to people, apostasia
- 14:01is something that men do.
- 14:03They're either committing an active apostasy, which is like idolatry, or they're committing
- 14:08apostasy from God, which they're separating themselves from God so that you got both
- 14:13the active or the middle force.
- 14:15But when you come to the rapture, that's God grabbing mankind and taking the believers
- 14:22in their glorified bodies to heaven.
- 14:24That's a passive transaction.
- 14:26And so if you have 750 years of apostasia use, where everything between the first use and
- 14:33the last use, everything in between those two uses is active, not passive.
- 14:43Then you can't take one passage in the New Testament and say, we think this one's passive.
- 14:49So what about the early church fathers?
- 14:52I mean, did they have writings outside of scripture?
- 14:55What were the traditions that they believed about this?
- 14:58Yes, very, very great question.
- 15:01You would think because the church fathers argued back and forth over every question that
- 15:06we argue over, they argued over whether one taken on one left is the rapture or being
- 15:11left behind, they argued over a lot of points like that.
- 15:16And they weren't afraid to call other people lunatics or crazy for disagreeing with them.
- 15:22When we come to the apostasia issue in 2nd Thessalonians 2, 3, we discover that none of
- 15:28them advocated for a physical departure.
- 15:32None of them mentioned physical departure as a possibility.
- 15:36None of them argued against it.
- 15:38None of them ridiculed it.
- 15:39They never heard of that interpretation.
- 15:42Not one of the church fathers mentioned it.
- 15:45Not in Greek or the Latin.
- 15:47So when you come to this question, you realize that they dealt with it only from the sense
- 15:54of rebellion.
- 15:56Some of them looked at it as political rebellion because some of the early church believed
- 16:01that the restrainer was the Roman Empire and when the Roman Empire fractured that was
- 16:07a restrainer being removed and the Antichrist would come forth, most of them believed that
- 16:11the restrainer, similar to us, was basically the church or God.
- 16:17And then when that restrainer is removed, the Antichrist would come forth.
- 16:21So they all looked at as rebellion, either political rebellion or apostasy rebellion in the
- 16:27last days in association with the Antichrist.
- 16:31Every last one.
- 16:32Wow.
- 16:33That's amazing too.
- 16:34You've got a lot of evidence seemingly from what you've studied and researched.
- 16:39And I know it's in the pages of your book.
- 16:41I want to mention again, friends, the book is on Amazon apostasyah in two Thessalonians
- 16:47three just came out within the last week or so.
- 16:52Lee Brainer can be found at soothekeep.info, more information and articles and more of his
- 16:59background and books and everything else, contacting there.
- 17:03So well, let's move on to the day of the Lord because we're still hanging out here in
- 17:07the second Thessalonians.
- 17:09It goes from first Thessalonians to second without the numbers, but it's still flowing.
- 17:13And the man of lawlessness, can you clarify what seems to be confusing to people between
- 17:18the day of the Lord and then the apostasy and the man of lawlessness being revealed?
- 17:25Yeah, one of the difficulties we face is that in verse two, we, in fact, I'll just pull
- 17:33this up.
- 17:34So in verse two, we, first of all, we've got a technical question, should it be the day
- 17:38of Christ or the day of the Lord?
- 17:41The King James, New King James have the day of Christ and the modern versions have day
- 17:46of the Lord.
- 17:47Now typically I side with the Byzantine text against the modern text.
- 17:53I am a Byzantine text guy, but there are instances where the Byzantine text is divided.
- 17:59And here it's divided, it's 50, 50 divided.
- 18:02So if you go to the early versions, you'll find that all of the early versions have day
- 18:06of the Lord.
- 18:07And some of the early versions go all the way back to the early Latin prior to 200 A.D.
- 18:12that was used by Tertullian.
- 18:14And so that answers that question and all the old unseals have day of the Lord.
- 18:20So we can run with the day of the Lord.
- 18:21It's, to me, that's a slam dunk.
- 18:24So then in verse two, we read, don't be shaken in mind as if the day of the Lord was
- 18:30here.
- 18:31So Paul saying, don't let anyone worry you or trouble you as if the day of the Lord was
- 19:00here, that you're in it.
- 19:04He said, you're not in it.
- 19:06In verse three, he gives a reason.
- 19:08Let no one deceive you, but any means for that day is not here.
- 19:11You have to put the same verb in the ellipsis in verse three that you found in verse two.
- 19:18You can't put the future in there like many modern versions do.
- 19:21You can't, an ellipsis has to have the exact same verb as it was in the verse before.
- 19:28So it's letting no man deceive you for any means that day is not here unless the falling
- 19:34away come first and the man has sinned and revealed.
- 19:36So if you look around and you see the Antichrist, you were in the day of the Lord.
- 19:41You were in the tribulation.
- 19:42If you look around and you don't see the Antichrist, then you are not in the tribulation.
- 19:47You are not in the day of the Lord.
- 19:49And it doesn't matter how severe the persecution is that you're facing.
- 19:52So to me, this is a very clear passage and that's, that's really a blessing.
- 19:57We're going up in the rapture.
- 19:59We are not going through the day of the Lord.
- 20:02So it's interesting to me.
- 20:03One of my favorite translations has been the new American standard, probably because that
- 20:07was the first Bible I bought in 1981 and I still have it.
- 20:12What is it?
- 20:13The Charles Ryry study Bible, man.
- 20:14I still have that.
- 20:15Oh man, that was a classic falling apart and everything.
- 20:18But the words in verse three, it will not come are in italics.
- 20:25Yes.
- 20:26It's interesting.
- 20:28So what would be the purpose for that?
- 20:30It's like there are other meanings or possibilities or what do you think?
- 20:36So that's the ellipsis.
- 20:38Now we use ellipsis all the time in English.
- 20:40I could say yesterday I caught eight brown trout when I was fishing and today I caught five.
- 20:50So we didn't say brown trout again and we didn't even insert fishing again.
- 20:58People just understand it.
- 20:59Greek does the same thing all the time, although some of their elliptical patterns seem odd
- 21:04to the English hearing.
- 21:06So verse two says that the day of the Lord, as though the day of the Lord is here or
- 21:13had come, we have to put that same thing in verse three.
- 21:17So in verse three, we would supply that day is not here because it's negated.
- 21:22So it is not here unless you see the falling away and the antichrist.
- 21:30So you have to supply it.
- 21:31When you supply, it's the Greeks requires you to use the same noun or the same verb in
- 21:38the same tense.
- 21:40So in some translations, you're saying they're using different tenses.
- 21:45So they'll have the past perfect in verse two and you can translate the perfect by the
- 21:51past perfect or the present perfect and which for here is here or is present is both present
- 21:58and present perfect.
- 22:00But when you come to verse three, you have to have the same verb.
- 22:04You'll have to have the past perfect has come, the present perfect is come.
- 22:08You have to have that whatever you have in verse two, you should have in verse three.
- 22:13Most of the translations have the future tense in verse three and that really I think gives
- 22:18us a misleading idea because he's not saying that when you see the antichrist, then the
- 22:24day of the Lord is on the horizon.
- 22:26He's saying, if you see the antichrist, you are in the day of the Lord.
- 22:31Wow.
- 22:32That's a good explanation.
- 22:34What you just said, friends, if you're watching on video anyway, go back and rewind about
- 22:3930 seconds, do a minute there and get that understanding of it.
- 22:44The tense is so important.
- 22:46And as it is for a lot of scripture, this same exercise that you're going through, so
- 22:54important for other scriptures, okay, we've got about four and a half minutes left.
- 22:58You said at the beginning of the podcast, this is not a central issue to the gospel and
- 23:03our salvation.
- 23:04But as believers, it's good to know and understand the differences in translations and what we
- 23:10can do when we're reading our Bibles, when we're studying a certain translation to compare.
- 23:16Can you give us a little encouragement there and what we can do, what we can look for?
- 23:20Yeah, absolutely.
- 23:21I think there's a value in someone having two, three, four literal translations instead
- 23:26of just one.
- 23:27Obviously, you're going to have the one that you go to, your favorite, and you're going
- 23:30to lean on that more than the rest.
- 23:32But you'll look up the same passage and other literal translations.
- 23:37And it's useful to use whether you're going to have a shelf full of commentaries or whether
- 23:42you use the commentaries in a website like Blue Letter Bible to look at commentaries
- 23:47of people who actually know a little Greek or Hebrew, if you're in the Old Testament.
- 23:52And they can point out places where translations can be improved.
- 23:56And if you use your God-given wisdom comparing scripture with scripture, you'll see that, yeah,
- 24:01that's probably true.
- 24:03So we don't have to be thrown in this issue.
- 24:06We don't have to approach this issue and think, well, how am I going to understand it if
- 24:09I'm not a Greek scholar, lean on the English translations, and lean on the scholars that
- 24:14give us help in the commentaries.
- 24:16It's actually a great blessing.
- 24:18Okay, so I know you're speaking all over the place and kicking things off for the summer.
- 24:22Lee Brainer, you were at Rapture in the Rockies, an amazing conference with a lot of great
- 24:27men of God, but for June 4 through 7, and people can still, I think, access that all
- 24:33the sessions.
- 24:34But what you spoke twice, what were you, your two topics?
- 24:38Well, I delivered two messages, which I have never given before publicly.
- 24:42So I'm taking a little bit of a new course.
- 24:44I'll be straddling the fence between apologetics and Bible prophecy.
- 24:49The first message is called, when the gods broke the calendar.
- 24:53It's about the time, an event around 701 BC, when the whole world went from a 360 day
- 25:00year to a 365 and a quarter day year, and they had to scramble because their calendars
- 25:05were out of sync.
- 25:06Their feasts weren't lining up on the right days, and they had all kinds of problems.
- 25:11The solar year and the lunar year didn't line up.
- 25:13This is why we have solar calendars and lunar calendars, and they're all over the map.
- 25:18And then I'm going to explain how this happened, which was planetary catastrophism, and that
- 25:26this 360 day year, we're going to go back to a 360 day year in the kingdom.
- 25:33Now the second message is called catastrophism in history and prophecy.
- 25:40And I'm going to explain how there's been a series of great catastrophes in the Bible.
- 25:48We see the flood, we see the Tower of Babel, we see the Sodom Gamora, and we see the time
- 25:55of the Exodus, the destruction on Egypt.
- 25:58We also see later on a smaller time with David when the mountains melted, and in the time
- 26:04it has a chia when the sundown moved back 10 steps, which by the way was not 10 steps
- 26:09on a daily sundown, was 10 steps on an annual sundown with, which was five days because
- 26:16there's 720 steps on it.
- 26:19So and these, these Bible catastrophes line up with the, with the end, with the flood, with
- 26:27there's a universal flood in ancient history, it lines up the Tower of Babel lines up with
- 26:31the end of the gold age, Sodom Gamora lines up at the end of the silver age, the Exodus
- 26:37lines up at the end of the bronze age, and then you'll find that the time of David and
- 26:43the time of Hezekiah line up with other major events that were known in ancient history
- 26:48in the Iron Age.
- 26:50So this will be a tremendous time, really to give people some insight in an apologetic
- 26:54issue.
- 26:55Wow, that sounds awesome.
- 26:57So people can go check those out.
- 26:59The messages will probably be online.
- 27:01You can access those.
- 27:02Lee, thank you for all you do, brother.
- 27:04Again, friends, apostasyia is the new revision, the new book.
- 27:08Check that out if you haven't before.
- 27:10Brother, thanks again.
- 27:11Do this again, Lord willing.
- 27:13Amen, brother.
- 27:14Thank you for the opportunity.
- 27:15You're welcome.
- 27:16God bless you, friends, and as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.
- 27:20See you next time.