Latest / But is it Biblical? / Episode 67: Jubilees Part 3 - More than Inspired…Prophetic. The Case for the Essenes.

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Episode 67: Jubilees Part 3 - More than Inspired…Prophetic. The Case for the Essenes. · But is it Biblical?

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Glenn.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Lydia.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: And you're listening to, but is it biblical?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We invite you to join in as we evaluate church tradition and discover what scripture truly teaches.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what episode it is?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, gee, I wonder.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Six seven.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, welcome back, everyone.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: This is episode sixty-seven.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's biblical.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: See?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is, but I didn't time it right because I don't think we're talking much about six and seven today.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and just if anyone hasn't listened yet, remind them why six seven is not a junior high trend on this podcast.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because six is humanity and seven is completeness.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: So what are we talking about today, Glenn?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: We are talking about interpreting spiritual truth to those who are spiritual.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, we are removing another couple blocks from the bottom of the Jenga Tower of Evangelicalism.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Ooh, from the bottom this time, huh?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: Just flick that little piece out of there.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Got it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: No, but really, we're gonna test the reasons that evangelicals dismiss Jubilees.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we're looking at differences that we see between Jubilees and the Bible, specifically Genesis and the first part of Exodus, which is what Jubilees covers.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're looking at additions to stories and what seem on the surface to be contradictions.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: For the additions, like where Jubilees adds to the story, we're going to ask ourselves: is this a good reason to reject Jubilees?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And for the contradictions, we're going to search the Bible to see if the contradiction truly is a contradiction.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Bible is not one book.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a collection of books that we then took and bound together, forming one book, and then we decided nothing could be added or taken away from it, and then we took away from it.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then we in the U.S.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: decided in 1978 that it doesn't matter how many books you decide to have in your canon as long as you call it inerrant.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, listen to episodes four and five for more on that.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: But then conservative evangelical churches decided that it does matter how many books are in the canon.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's 66, no more, no less, and those are the only ones that are inspired and inerrant.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Evangelicals dismiss Jubilees as uninspired.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: They say there are contradictions, like the one we saw about Jacob not lying to Isaac a couple of weeks ago.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: But most of those contradictions can be easily resolved.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: In the case of Jacob lying, we saw that evangelicals simply haven't read Jubilees.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because Jacob clearly lies to Isaac in Jubilees.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the contradiction argument is usually just an ignorance thing.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: It can be verified or falsified simply by reading and studying both writings.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just the simple fact that some people believe that Jacob was not lying in Jubilees is enough for me to not take anything else they say about the book seriously, because it's clear they haven't read it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which, ironically, applies to the Bible too for many of them.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to the additions argument, the logic is that an author that lived several hundred years or even a thousand years after the Torah was written simply couldn't know more details of what happened.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: The argument says that an addition to a story found in Genesis in Jubilees means that Jubilees can't be true because it came later and it adds to the story.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if the older writing says one thing and the newer writing by an author who wasn't there adds more details to that, then the new writing must be discounted.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's the logic that evangelicals use to say that the newer writings aren't inspired or canonical.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: But that logic doesn't fly.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: All you need to do is simply look at the writings in your own canon.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: For example, let's look at another story about Jacob.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's found in Genesis 32.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: It says that Jacob wrestled with a man all night.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: That word for wrestled means a physical wrestling match, like a physical altercation.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And even after the man injured Jacob, it says Jacob held on and wouldn't let the man go.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 26, the man says, Let me go, for the day has broken.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the man's response is in verse 28.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Then he said, Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: That word for striven is Sarah.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's H eighty two eighty, and it means to exert physical power or to contend with physically.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the blessing to Jacob was that his name was changed to he strives with God.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the meaning of Israel.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: It can also be translated as God prevails.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's not he wrestles with God.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same concept.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: Alright.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: But that's something that we're gonna get to here in a second.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: The difference.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Then as a result, in verse 30, it says, So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, reading that story in Genesis, it's pretty clear that Jacob was physically wrestling with God, right?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: He thought it was a man and it turned out to be God.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: He even got a physical injury out of it.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also clear that Jacob is portrayed as being tough as nails.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis says that the man did not prevail against Jacob.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So Jacob won a physical, literal fight.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was a literal story.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: He wrestled with God.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's open up a writing that came later and see if the Jews at a later time saw that story as a physical, literal fight.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hosea talks about this encounter Jacob had, and Hosea 12, 3 through 4 says, In the womb he took his brother by the heel, and in his manhood he strove with God.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: He strove with the angel and prevailed.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: He wept and sought his favor.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: He met him at Bethel, and there God spoke with us.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, this account adds some details to the Genesis story, but also appears to contradict it.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: First, Hosea says that Jacob strove with God, he strove with the angel.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was equating God with an angel there.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Second, it uses the word strove twice in English, but not in Hebrew.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: The first part that says he grabbed his brother's heel, and when he was a man, he strove with God.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is the same word that is found in Genesis.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: A physical altercation, Sarah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the second strove is a different word.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: When it says he strove with the angel, it's not Sarah, it's Sur, H.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: 7786.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it has a less physical connotation.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, it means to rule over like a king or prince, but the figurative meaning is that he struggled, not physically, but emotionally and mentally.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It means he struggled with Israel for three years because they didn't want him as ruler.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So Jacob's striving is different here in Hosea.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the third thing that stands out in Hosea is that it doesn't portray Jacob as being tough, even though he prevailed.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: It says he wept.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the word for sought his favor there is Hanan.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's H2603, and it's in the Hithpal form there.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: It means to beg or plead for mercy or favor.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in there twice in a row, meaning it was intense.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis, Jacob was physically tough and demanded favor.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: In Hosea, he cried and begged for it.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: It paints a different picture.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of Jacob having God in a headlock, physically restraining him and demanding a blessing, Jacob is really struggling, probably holding on to God's garments and begging him to have favor on him.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if you only read the story in Genesis and ignore Hosea, you come to a very different conclusion about what was going on there.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: But then the book of Hosea comes along, which, if you're an evangelical and hold to the traditional dating of Genesis, was 700 years later.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in modern scholarship, that 700-year gap doesn't exist.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Many scholars believe Hosea was actually written 150 to 200 years before the final version of Genesis that we have now.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we're testing what evangelicals believe here, which is the older timeline of Genesis.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Those evangelicals prevent new books from being added to the Bible based on the addition of new details or alleged contradictions.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they discount Jubilees.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, the concept of inerrancy makes the addition of new books next to impossible anyway.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Bible can't be inerrant if it's missing something.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: By accepting another book into the canon, you're admitting that it wasn't perfect and complete to begin with.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if the Jews used that same logic, that new details and newer writings are a basis for not including them in the Bible, then Hosea wouldn't belong in the Bible either.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I believe it does.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I have no problem that someone 700 years later wrote that Jacob was less like Hulk Hogan and more like Jack Black.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because I can take that information, look back at the language in Genesis and say, yeah, that makes sense.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry, I'm still trying to get over Hulk versus Jack Black.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking of Jack Black's wrestling movie.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, what was that?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Taco?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Libre.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nacho.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not Taco.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Nacho.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, sorry, y'all.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: But in the same way, evangelicals obviously don't care that details were added by one writing 700 years after the original writing.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: We know that because they decided to include both books in their canon.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't reject Hosea.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they could give books like Enoch and Jubilees the same consideration.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: If only they hadn't shot themselves in the foot by claiming the 66th Bible is perfect and complete as is.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because that claim rejects and denies future archaeology.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if we find another writing by Paul?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or one of the disciples?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Evangelicals are going to need a serious spin doctor.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what about the contradictions we see in the story with Jacob?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Was it God or an angel?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Was Jacob tough or crying?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Were these two accounts really contradicting each other?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, they weren't.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because we know that Jesus is called the angel of the presence in Isaiah 63, 8 to 9.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: The angel of the face, Malach Panim.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 32, 30, Jacob names the place Peniel, which means the face of God.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: In Hosea, Jacob strove with God.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Hosea is talking about the angel of the presence, Jesus.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is both man and the face of God.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: He is the version of God that we can see.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: When we look into his face, we will see God.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when you take this picture of Jacob begging and reread the story in Genesis 32, you can totally see what is going on.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: It completely puts the story from Genesis in a new perspective.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a clarification, not a contradiction.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: The author of Hosea was taking the story in Genesis as an allegory.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Genesis account was not meant to convey facts.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob had a heart that sought after God and really struggled with it and begged God to bless him.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It probably didn't appear to be as much of a contradiction if you lived back then and not only spoke the language of the authors, but also knew the idioms and the double and triple meanings of some terms, in the metaphors, in the allegorical way of writing, and the way numbers had deeper meaning.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there is spiritual truth to discern, which goes way beyond the literal story and is the only thing that matters.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I even like the tiny little difference in the word crying, weep, striving, begging.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in English, you hear the word crying, you think somebody's weak and upset, emotionally distraught.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: You hear weeping, and it's maybe because they're mourning.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's just like even in English, there's little differences in how those words are used.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: We cannot fully understand.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: No, not completely of the author so long ago.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Those of us who rely solely on the Holy Spirit and don't box God in to our own understanding of 66 books, we have an easier time reading books like Enoch and Jubilees and seeing truth and inspiration.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let's look at some more examples in Jubilee.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, first, do you want to know what Jubilee says about Jacob's wrestling match?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's read it.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it skips it entirely.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wait, what?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's absent because the author didn't care.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: No way.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: We find the same setting and time and place from Genesis 32 in Jubilees.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh Jubilees chapter 29, but the author never mentions a wrestling match.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Does he take does he fall asleep and have the dream and all that?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: But he does mention God changing his name to Israel uh a few chapters later in Jubilees 32.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 17 says, The Lord appeared to Jacob during the night.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: He blessed him and said to him, You are not to be called Jacob only, but you will be named Israel.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now the setting there is a different setting.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's after he left that place.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not a contradiction of Genesis, because it's retelling the second time God tells Jacob of the name change.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we find that account in Genesis 35.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Verses 9 to 10 says, God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Padan Aram and blessed him.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And God said to him, Your name is Jacob, no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: So he called his name Israel.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So then both accounts in Jubilees 32 and Genesis 35, then go on to elaborate on the blessing that God gave Jacob.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: In both accounts, it includes how God will increase Jacob's numbers and how kings will come from him.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's an interesting difference that comes next.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 35, 12 says, The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: That word offspring is singular.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: It means seed, which then grows, so it's really both, kind of like the English word man, which can mean either a single man or all of humanity.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: But then Paul would later explain what that word meant.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Galatians 3 16 says, Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: It does not say and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one and to your offspring, who is Christ.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now listen to how Jubilees describes this part of the blessing.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: It uses the same word, so I'll just say seed here.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees 32 19 says, I will give your seed all of the land that is beneath the sky.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: They will rule over all the nations just as they wish.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Afterwards they will gain the entire earth and they will possess it forever.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the author of Jubilees didn't know about Jesus Christ, just like the author of Genesis.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if we read this in the light of what Paul said, it means that Jesus will rule over all the nations just as he wishes, and he will gain the entire earth and will possess it forever.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we also know now that Jesus paid the debt of all of humanity and grafted us into this covenant.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: None of the authors of Genesis, Hosea, or Jubilees, or any of the Old Testament, for that matter, they didn't know the spiritual truth behind what they were writing at the time.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: They just knew that they were writing down this literal story about Jacob.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: God was telling a story to the world using the story of the Jewish people, and in the case of Jacob, by at least three different Jewish authors, and in three slightly different ways.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: None of the authors understood what it actually meant spiritually.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Heck, the disciples didn't even know what the Old Testament authors meant until after the resurrection.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they continued to learn and struggle with what it meant over the next several years as the Gentiles started receiving the Holy Spirit.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: The deeper meaning behind this whole story of Jacob wrestling is that we all struggle with God, but in the end, he will bless us all.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all due to Jesus Christ's faith, whether you know it or not.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Moving into more examples from Jubilees, what else do evangelicals use to discount it?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: One thing is the differences in ages of some of the patriarchs.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Genesis says that Jared was 162 years old when he fathered Enoch.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Jubilees says it happened during the fifth week in the fourth year of the 11th Jubilee, which, if you do the calculations, would make him 62, not 162.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a contradiction because of a difference in facts?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you're just looking at facts and relying on your calculations, then yes, it's a contradiction.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: But have you read Jubilees?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, an Essene wrote it.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: The book is not meant to be mathematically correct, even though they were brilliant mathematicians.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes were being highly creative.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: The book is all divided into Jubilees or 49 year periods.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not done to be historically or factually correct, it is done to be spiritually correct.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were a mystical group.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: They always sought the deeper, more spiritual meaning, and unlike the other Jews, they believed you could have personal encounters with God.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: They were not throwing birthday parties for the patriarchs.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: They were telling the story of how events fit into God's grand design, the testimony.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you're reading this book, looking for all the facts to line up with your inerrant canon, then you're not going to like it.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: But just like C.S.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, who told the story of Jesus Christ with talking animals and secret doors and a lion singing Narnia into existence, if you try to take everything literally and miss the allegory, you're going to be lost and confused.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes were focused on getting people to rely on God and the way He set things up rather than on self.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was their whole purpose because they believed that the temple and the priests in the temple had corrupted the temple.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So they were saying, rely on the sun rather than the moon.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they used the stories that they all knew to do it, as well as the concept of the sun being supreme.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: The calendar was not meant to be, nor is it exact.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the Essenes even lived their whole lives based on this solar calendar just to make a point.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just like their favorite prophet Isaiah did.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember what Isaiah did?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: Something about being naked for really long time.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Three years straight.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was naked and barefoot for three years straight, just to make the point that Judah should not trust alliances with Egypt.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: But he wasn't doing it half-heartedly.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't put his clothes back on when he went home at night when nobody could see him.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: Job's done.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: Time to get dressed again.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: He lived the metaphor out completely.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of prophets did this, actually.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: They sacrificed a normal life to make God's point.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: They lived the metaphor.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes did this with the calendar.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: They lived and died by the solar calendar, following its rules and dates, all in an attempt to warn the Pharisees and Sadducees that what they were doing was against God's law, the way he set the world up.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: In ancient Jewish mysticism, a symbol wasn't just a drawing on a page or a figure of speech.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was something you embodied.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: If the Essenes believed the mainstream world was fundamentally broken and operating on corrupted human time, which would be the moon, then the only way to remain pure was to physically align their bodies, their sleep schedules, and their prayers with divine uncorrupted time, which would be the sun.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: But like you said, the math doesn't really add up.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: But they knew that.
• 26:59
  unknown: Wow.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, their entire existence at Qumran uh was a living, breathing polemic against Jerusalem.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the calendar was the script for that protest.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes completely and totally separated themselves from the rest of the world.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: They even lived by themselves as hermits in the desert.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: They were a voice crying out, In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's Isaiah 43, their flagship verse.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Isaiah wrote it, the naked prophet himself.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes, despite their creativity, were also brilliant astronomers and mathematicians.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: They knew the math was wrong by 1.24 days, but they never fixed it.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: They never added leap days.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: They also knew they were skipping the year of Jubilee, which would make a Jubilee period 50 years, not 49.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: But they were making a point.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes knew their time of prophecy was short, just like all the other prophets.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody even knows what happened to them.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Most scholars just assume they were completely wiped out by the Romans.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: But their writings miraculously survived.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: One of those writings is called the War Scroll.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: It describes an upcoming apocalyptic battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's just more allegory.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right in line with the metaphor the Essenes were living.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: So please, don't try to match up the ages in Jubilees with the ages in Genesis.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: It never gives exact ages anyway.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's all based on God's design.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: It gives ages in Jubilees and Sabbaths of years.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, during the Babylonian exile, God told Ezekiel in Ezekiel 40, 43, 44, and 48 that only the Zadekites were worthy enough to talk to God, because they were the only ones who stayed faithful when the rest of Israel went astray.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the Essene leaders were the true Zadekites, the sons of Zadok.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody could speak for God in one hundred fifty BC, it was them.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Your own canon says so.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And just for a little more history, Zadok was the high priest during the reigns of David and Solomon.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: He helped carry the Ark of the Covenant to protect it, and he stayed loyal when David's sons tried to take the throne away from him.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Twice, even though the other high priest joined the rebellion.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Zadok's name means righteous or justified.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: But later on his descendants were the ones who never went astray and were the only ones that were considered worthy by God.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my answer to the math facts argument.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone ever tells you not to read Jubilees because it doesn't have apostolic or prophetic authority, just point them to Ezekiel.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: If they're evangelical, they likely already believe that Jubilees was written by an Essene.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Educate them on what that means, according to their own canon.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes didn't think they were contradicting Genesis.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: They adored Genesis.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: They were simply telling God's story through a different perspective.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like a color that can be both orange and red depending on where you're standing or how the lighting reflects on it, or a teal that can be both blue and green.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: The actual color never changes.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But perspective matters.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when you shine the right light on it in the right way, you see the true color.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is that light.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk about another misunderstanding.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Evangelicals discount Jubilees because they say it paints a picture of Abraham, that he was perfect and kept God's law his whole life.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: They say that about Isaac and Jacob as well.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Jeffers gave a sermon where he talks about God's grace.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's actually a pretty good sermon.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: But in it, he makes the point that the Jews believed that Abraham's works and obedience to the law were what saved him, and not grace.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: He uses Genesis 15, 6, which says that Abraham believed the Lord and it was counted to him as righteousness.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jeffhrus says that Abraham's belief, which is faith, is why he was credited as righteous and not his obedience to the law.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with that, as long as you're defining the law as being the law of Moses with all the sacrifices and everything.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jeffers is correct that the law of Moses, as the Jews understood it back then, was about works, not grace.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the case as God understood it, right?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: His law has never changed, even with the law of Moses.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: But Jeffhrus then uses the example of Jubilees to show that Jews believed Abraham was righteous because of his works and not his faith.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't say it directly, but he implied that Jubilees should not be canonical because it doesn't teach faith, it teaches works.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: But apparently he doesn't realize that his canon does the same thing.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: For the times of the ancients were 19 Jubilees for their lifetimes.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: After the flood, they started to decrease from 19 Jubilees, to be fewer with respect to Jubilees, to age quickly, and to have their times be completed because of the numerous difficulties and through the wickedness of their ways, with the exception of Abraham.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: For Abraham was perfect with the Lord in everything that he did, being properly pleasing throughout all his lifetime, and yet he had not completed four jubilees during his lifetime by the time he became old because of wickedness, and reached the end of his time.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: So this passage says that Abraham was perfect, yet died early because of wickedness.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: How is that possible?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's only possible if the law that Abraham kept, which was counted to him as righteousness, had nothing to do with obedience and everything to do with the heart.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which is what we see in Genesis 15, when it says Abraham believed God and was counted righteous.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But evangelicals, including Jeffhras, take this verse in Jubilees and say that because it says Abraham was perfect, that grace was not involved.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore Jubilees is not inspired and should not be in our canon.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if you read the whole thing, we see a different story because Abraham was perfect, but he also died due to wickedness.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Genesis never says Abraham was perfect, right?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or does it?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if evangelicals are going to use this first to say that Jubilees isn't inspired, then we shouldn't expect to see something similar in Genesis, right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: I I see your eyes.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: See my evil laugh coming.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: I see your eyebrows.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go to Genesis 26.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: God is passing the blessing of Abraham onto Isaac here, and he tells Isaac the reason why.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 5 says, Because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's take that and compare that verse that disqualifies Jubilees with this verse in Genesis.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham was perfect in all of his deeds with the Lord, and well pleasing and righteous all the days of his life.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's Jubilees.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And to evangelicals, it means he was obedient to the law, works.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then here's Genesis.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Is that not the same thing?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Does that disqualify Genesis?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_03: They sound like they just walk hand in hand.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're saying the same thing in different words.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: When reading both of these passages, you must understand what God's law, his testimony, really is.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Love God and love others.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do we know that?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's how God defines his law.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was Jesus speaking.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: But then evangelicals say, well, Jubilees makes it sound like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob kept the law before the law was even a thing.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Then so does Genesis 26, 5.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: But if you understand the true definition of God's law, then there's no problem here.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: If the law, including the festivals and the Sabbaths, was all about the heart, then who's to say they didn't keep the law?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like both Genesis and Jubilees says.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees says that God's law is eternal.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it says that right after talking about the Sabbath, which is about community and worship.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was all about selfless sacrificial love.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jeffers' whole point in his sermon was that grace has always been the only way to be counted as righteous.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with him.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: But Jubilees does too.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees does not contradict that.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what Jubilees says about the rest of the patriarchs.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: We go to chapter 6, verse 15, and the angel is telling Moses about the festival of weeks, which is based on renewing and remembering God's covenant with Noah, that he wouldn't destroy the earth again with a flood.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it says that this covenant, this festival, is eternal, and that the angels have celebrated and kept it in heaven since the beginning of creation.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's equating the festival with the covenant.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then Noah and his sons kept it until Noah died.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then his sons corrupted it until Abraham.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then in verse 19, the angel tells Moses, Abraham alone kept it, and his sons Isaac and Jacob kept it until your lifetime.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: During your lifetime, the Israelites forgot it until I renewed it for them at this mountain.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so evangelicals say that this is saying that they kept these festivals before the festivals even existed.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: But when you see and read here, you see that it's equating the festival with the covenant.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: What the author is saying here is that the law of Moses was a renewal of the eternal covenant that has been around from the beginning of creation.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity is God's creation, created to and for love, and in the end everything will be renewed.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Essenes took that, created a literal calendar as a metaphor, and lived out that metaphor like only true prophets can do.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: But evangelicals take this passage as proof that Jubilees is false, because it teaches that the law of Moses was around, and that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob obeyed that literal law to a T, including the festivals before they were even introduced.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: I sympathize with Jesus here.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's no wonder he said what he did in John 5.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 32, he said, There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then verses 37 to 40 says, And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, God's testimony, his creation, the way he set things up, is a witness to selfless sacrificial love.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: The scriptures bear witness too, but people miss it and they refuse to deny self and live in humility, which is exactly what evangelicals are doing today.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees is a witness to God, written by the only people that were worthy of speaking with God, the Zadekites, and we deny it in favor of an Old Testament canon that does not include Jubilees, which is a canon that was decided on by the very people who heard God say that the Zadekites were God's priests and then turned their backs on what God wanted.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament canon we have today comes from the Pharisaic tradition, which is what we now call rabbinic Judaism.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: And our current canon is based on the books that those Pharisees chose to accept and reject.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, we reject the books that the true prophets and priests of God wrote.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: God told Ezekiel this around 580 BC.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Enoch was written around 350 BC.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees was written around 150 BC, at the same time the Jews split into sects.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: That was when these prophets of God listened to God, just like the former prophets did, and they moved out to the desert to live out the metaphor.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: How do we know?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because they told us in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: All of the other examples and jubilees of the patriarchs following the festivals and feasts have the exact same outcome.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: The festivals and feasts are not literal, they are eternal.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: They are meant to symbolize the testimony of God.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: They were indeed a literal story, but they were a parable that was used to teach.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: The spiritual meaning.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: What the festivals and laws represented was always around.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was eternal.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, they were all people who got that.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, did the authors and prophets always know that it wasn't literal?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Did they know God's master plan?
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even think the Essenes knew, honestly.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: They were addressing current events that were happening at the time they were writing.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: But they knew about selflessness and reliance on God, and they were obedient, not hypocritical like the Pharisees and Sadducees.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, like I pointed out before, even the disciples of Jesus didn't know what God was doing and what he had done, and what it all meant, until the Spirit was given.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today we have the opportunity to see the spiritual meaning of Scripture for ourselves, but it requires humility of the heart.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you look at Revelation, there were current events that John was writing about, like Nero and the Romans, but that literal meaning is not why he had his vision.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: I know I titled episode 62 The Revelation of John because he wrote it, but it wasn't really his revelation.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the first five words in the book are the revelation of Jesus Christ.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: While John wrote his book with current events in mind, God always has a deeper spiritual meaning with those he inspires to write.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because when God inspires someone to speak for him, it is always about his testimony.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the secret and hidden wisdom of God.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul explains this.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 6 says, Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, the writings may be about current rulers, but that's not what it's really about.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: The next two verses say, But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: What he's saying is that nobody understood the scriptures, because if they had, they would have seen who Jesus Christ really was.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: They would have seen his works of selflessness and love, and they wouldn't have killed him.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Paul then goes on to quote one of those scriptures Isaiah 64 4 from the Essenes favorite prophet.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: Paul says, But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: For who knows a person's thoughts except the Spirit of that person which is in him?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given to us by God.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: So God teaches us things through the scriptures, from people he inspires, but they can only be understood through his spirit.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ask yourself the question.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was a prayer based on current events.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Babylonians had destroyed the temple and the Jews were in exile.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul understood the spiritual point, separate from the current events that Isaiah was dealing with.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the spiritual points that God makes through the prophets, who deal with current events, while the current events are temporary, the spiritual truths are timeless.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: For example, when John writes about a monster as a metaphor for the literal tyrant Nero, God's spiritual truth there is about pride, not a ruler who passes away.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: God couldn't give two flips about Nero.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's seen worse.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this was his revelation, not John's.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: But this spiritual way of thinking and interpreting Scripture is foolishness to those who are relying on their own understanding.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Paul continues in 1 Corinthians, he says, The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: But we have the mind of Christ.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: When Paul there says, For who has misunderstood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's another quote.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Can you guess who he's quoting?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's Isaiah forty thirteen in the same chapter in just a few verses from the flagship verse of the Essenes.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's go back to Jubilees.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees 19 8 records Sarah's death, Abraham's wife.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it says that this event of Sarah's death was the tenth test by which Abraham was tried.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: But Abraham was found to be faithful and patient in spirit, because he didn't focus on the promise God gave about giving him land.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he simply pleaded for a good place to bury her.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: And his faithfulness was recorded on the heavenly tablets as a friend of the Lord.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about the heart.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that faithfulness is why Abraham was declared righteous straight out of Jubilees.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: He could have been selfish and moved on, demanding God give him what was promised, but instead he wanted to stay and take care of Sarah.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: To say that Jubilees is concerned about the works of the patriarchs, rather than their faith, is short-sighted and ignorant.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's a scholar named David Wilbur.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: He believes the 66-book Bible is inerrant and complete.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually getting a degree from the seminary that was started by Norman Geisler, who wrote the initial rough draft of the articles of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about it in episodes four and five.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Wilbur wrote an article on Jubilees, detailing why it is not inspired or canonical.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: He writes, perhaps the biggest conflict between Jubilees and Scripture is Jubilees' extremely negative attitude toward Gentiles.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then he gives three examples, all of which I can easily debunk.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the one I want to focus on is this.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wilbur says, quote, Jubilees prohibits Jews from having fellowship and sharing meals with Gentiles.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then he cites Jubilees 22, 16, which says, Now you, my son Jacob, remember what I say and keep the commandments of your father Abraham.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: Separate from the nations and do not eat with them.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do not act as they do, and do not become their companion, for their actions are something that is impure, and all their ways are defiled, and something abominable and detestable.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wilber contrasts that verse in Jubilees with the Old Testament.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: He says, These anti-Gentile sentiments and Jubilees are opposed to what Scripture reveals about God's heart toward the Gentiles.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he's correct about this to a degree.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: While God does call the Israelites to not do as the outsiders do and to not be like them or intermarry with them, he also calls for the Israelites to be kind to them and to welcome them.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: And while there's a prohibition on intermarriage, there are examples of Israelites marrying outsiders that God actually accepts.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because the purpose of the law was to prevent idolatry.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a literal prohibition with no exceptions.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and I had to remind myself, you're using the word outsider.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: The article, he's using the word gentile, and I was like, oh, I I mistakenly hear Gentile and think New Testament, but I remember.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, Gentile just means not a Jew.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: Not a Jew.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's all it means.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_03: Outsider, Gentile, Old Testament, New Testament.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's interchangeable.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: It just means not a Jew.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we see people that aren't Jews, like Ruth and Rahab.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: Moses married two outsiders.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: The whole law has a purpose that goes beyond the literal.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And God also calls the outsiders to salvation in the Old Testament.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: In Isaiah 56, God tells the Gentiles to keep justice and do righteousness, to keep their hands from doing evil and to keep God's Sabbaths.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we know what the Sabbath is, which is right in line with keeping justice and doing righteousness.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: But both books say that the Sabbath was given to Israel.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Jubilees says that in Jubilees 2.31, and the Bible says that in Exodus 31, 16 to 17.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: It says that the Sabbath was given to Israel as a covenant, and that it's a sign between God and the people of Israel.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: So both Jubilees and the Bible agree on that, even though Isaiah tells the Gentiles to keep the Sabbath, right after telling them to do justice and righteousness.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah goes on to say that everyone, regardless of who or what you are, as long as you do what God wants, i.e., keep his Sabbaths, will be considered better than sons and daughters of God.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: But according to Wilbur, the biggest reason why Jubilees is not inspired is because of the negative attitude toward Gentiles.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: This argument that he's giving may actually prove the opposite, that Jubilees is inspired scripture.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: Wilbur said that Jubilees prohibits Jews from having fellowship and sharing meals with Gentiles.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he says that that concept isn't in the Old Testament.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if that concept didn't come from the Old Testament, then that means one of three things.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: Either it was an oral law that the Jews already understood, or it was a brand new concept that originated here in Jubilees, or it was an oral law that Jubilees then wrote down.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it must be one of those three, because Peter treated it as a law.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: So he thought it was a law at the time that he was preaching.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Wilbur forgot that.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: When Peter went to visit Cornelius, the first Gentile to receive the Spirit, what did Peter say to him?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Acts 10 28 says, And he said to them, You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter thought it was unlawful to associate at all with Gentiles, and he followed that law.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: Was he just pulling that law out of his rear end?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you think it came from?
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe he read it somewhere, like in Jubilees.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: But guess what?
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's understanding of this law also changed because God revealed to him through the Holy Spirit in a vision the true spiritual meaning behind it.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: That in the end God accepts everyone.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: After Peter said that it's illegal for Jews to associate with or visit Gentiles, he said this, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was sent for, I came without objection.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: You see, the Spirit revealed a spiritual truth to someone who was spiritual.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes didn't have the Holy Spirit.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Neither did the Old Testament prophets who saw visions, had dreams, or spoke directly with God.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: The author of Jubilees wrote this book a hundred and fifty years before Christ was even born, before the Holy Spirit was even introduced.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote it based on oral traditions that had been passed down, but he also wrote it as a member of the only people group that God was willing to communicate with, the sons of Zadok.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: And just like with the prophets of old, the author wrote using what he saw going on around him at the time, current events, current laws, but he wrote in a way that revealed so much more than just a literal interpretation will allow because he was inspired by God.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: And with that, we're going to take a little detour and come back to Peter in a minute.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's a question that's begging to be asked right now.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: The question is: when did God stop communicating directly with prophets and priests?
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: According to evangelicals, based on our current canon, God stopped after Malachi.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: So around 450 to 400 BC, which means Jubilees couldn't have possibly been inspired because God was silent.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because God took a 400-year break, and then Jesus was born.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: And as God, Jesus then communicated with us directly.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there were no prophets in those 400 years.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: Evangelicals call it the 400 silent years or the intertestamental period.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, I remember learning about that.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: It makes no sense.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_03: Like, why was there nothing?
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make sense.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_03: 400 years.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because from the time God started speaking through prophets and judges, so the time of Moses until the time of Jesus, this 400-year period is by far the longest gap in God speaking to his people.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: The next longest is just about 30 years.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: With Samuel, and he was getting anxious because he hadn't heard from God for so long.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why would God do that?
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why?
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if God told Ezekiel that he would only communicate with the sons of Zadok, then why would he not speak with the sons of Zadok?
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't say, I'm taking a break from you guys.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'll only speak with the Zadekites.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: We get our answer by looking at the last three books of the Old Testament to be written: Ezra, Nehemiah, and Malachi.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're wondering, the books in your canon aren't in chronological order.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_03: I know I was like, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ezra, Job is what went into my head.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: These books would be at the end if it was chronological.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra and Nehemiah were actually considered to be one book back then.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't separated until 900 AD for Christians and 1500 AD for Jews.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_03: Dude.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_03: So they're just one big scroll until one, yeah.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: One writing.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: The book of Ezra and Nehemiah detailed the return of the Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_03: And rebuilding the wall, right?
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_03: Nehemiah?
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was Nehemiah.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, right.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: Here, I'll make a very long story short.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra was a Zadekite priest and a scribe.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Nehemiah was a layman that helped rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and then later became governor.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra used his lineage to prove his validity as a Zadekite priest in Ezra 7, showing that one of his ancestors was Zadok.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then he went all the way back to Aaron.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you have a large family, you may already be aware that there are always some bad apples in the bunch.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the sons of Zadok were no exception.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Under Ezra, the Israelites set everything up correctly, with Zadekites as high priests.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: But then a few of them started corrupting the temple.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: A few of them intermarried with people outside Israel.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, they weren't the only ones.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: A ton of Israelites were doing this too.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Ezra was devastated, tearing his clothes, ripping the hair out of his head and beard.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: He prayed and lamented to God that Israel had once again failed to keep God's commandments.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra even names names in chapter 10.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: So everyone then repents, and a decade or so later, Nehemiah comes to help rebuild the walls.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: They build the wall and to celebrate, they have Ezra come in and read the book of the law of Moses to the crowd.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: Nehemiah is now governor, and together Ezra and Nehemiah declare that day to be holy.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Soon after, the Israelites got together and promised God that they would honor the covenant and keep the law of Moses and not marry foreigners.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that lasted a little while, but the people started marrying outside the Israelites again.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: Those darn Gentiles.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in Nehemiah 13, 9, Nehemiah says, Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then Nehemiah did his best to make things right.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to the end of the book of Ezra-Nehemiah.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then shortly after, Malachi is written.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we find out that the corruption continued.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: So to sum up so far, God declares the Zadekites the only high priests.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra is a Zadekite.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: He helped set up the priesthood with other Zadekites when the Israelites returned to Jerusalem, but some of them were naughty.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: Even so, this angers the other Zadekites like Ezra, the faithful ones.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to this anonymous book, Malachi.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, I say anonymous, it's not really, but I say that because Malachi is not a proper name.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: It means my messenger or my angel.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: Every evangelical you ask will say that Malachi is and was the name of a prophet, the final prophet.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the Jews disagree.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: The dominant view in rabbinic Judaism, which consists of the vast majority of Jews, is that Malachi was Ezra.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Zatekite priest and scribe.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: It even states in the Jewish Talmud directly, quote, Malachi is Ezra.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: That being said, Jews are not dogmatic about these kinds of beliefs, and there are other theories, but it's the majority traditional view that Malachi is Ezra.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: And get this, in the Septuagint, which is the Bible that Jesus and the disciples used, it doesn't say Malachi.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: It says by the hand of a messenger.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: Angelos.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if you read the Jewish Aramaic translation from the second century AD, it literally says, By the hand of my messenger, whose name is Ezra the scribe.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: Christians didn't even start believing it was a proper name until it was translated into Latin in the late fourth century by my pal Jerome.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: Even though Jerome learned from Jewish scholars, and he wrote a commentary on Malachi and admits in that commentary that the prevailing belief of the Jewish scholars at that time was that Malachi was Ezra.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jerome had no problem with that, but he changed it to a proper name because of a belief that origin started, that Malachi was an actual angel who descended from heaven and possessed a human body, and he couldn't have people falling for that.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was heresy to him that souls could fall from heaven and possess human bodies.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our modern translations are really silly when you think about it too, because English translations, including the ESV that I'm reading here, says Malachi with a capital M in the first verse, naming the author.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: But in verse 3, 1 it says, Behold, I send my messenger.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: My messenger there is the exact same word, Malachi.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: And evangelicals will die on the hill of there being a prophet named Malachi.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, something happened between when Nehemiah saw the corruption at the end of his writing and when Ezra decided to write Malachi.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because Malachi is a short four chapters all about the corruption of the temple in the priesthood.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, I believe the bad apples started letting others in.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there was a priestly civil war going on between the ones who were faithful Zadekites and those who were unfaithful.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because when the Sadducees took over later on, they claimed to be the Zadokites.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what their name actually means.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sadducees in Hebrew is Tsedokim, Tzadok, Em being plural and Zadok being Zadok.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_00: But they were considered corrupt, even if their bloodline was from the line of Zadok.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes, however, were the pure, faithful Zadekites.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when you read the rest of Malachi 3:1, it says, Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows that's talking about John the Baptist and Jesus.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: It says, My messenger will prepare the way before me, and then the Lord whom you seek will come to his temple.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, Ezra didn't know that at the time, but we know that now.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: But a Zadekite wrote this, Ezra, a pure Zadekite who was loyal to God, and then 50 to 60 years later, first Enoch was written, and then about 150 years after that, Jubilees was written by an Essene, a group that was formed by the true Zadokites.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Essenes moved out to the wilderness, taking first Enoch and Jubilees with them.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then those Essenes said they were the voice in the wilderness preparing the way for the Lord.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then John the Baptist and Essene did just that.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Lord suddenly came to his temple, fulfilling the covenant in which the Israelites delighted.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to the question, why did God stop speaking?
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: is that he didn't.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_00: We simply stopped listening.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: God never stopped speaking for more than a few decades from the time of Mount Sinai until Jesus came to speak for him.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus left us the Holy Spirit, so we all have access to communication with God, but he never stopped trying to speak with us that whole time.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Jews rejected the people who would later become the Essenes, just like the Israelites rejected all of the other prophets before them.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: For those 400 years, what evangelicals call the 400 silent years, God wasn't silent at all.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: We just rejected him, and we continue to reject the inspired writings and voices that came out of that wilderness.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us back to Jubilees and Peter, and the inspiration of the Spirit.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Peter believed and lived by the law that he was not to associate with Gentiles.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: The only place that law is found, according to evangelicals, is right here in Jubilees.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Peter was not just a disciple, he's the rock.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Upon this rock I will build my church.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We hold Peter in pretty high esteem.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we also count his letters as canonical scripture, but it appears that he himself used Jubilees as scripture.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Even though he first focused on the literal and misunderstood the spiritual meaning behind it.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_00: But God, through his spirit, showed Peter what it meant.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_00: The covenant with Abraham had to be explained by Paul in Galatians 3.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because without the Spirit, the offspring of Abraham is the Israelites.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But with the Spirit, we understand the offspring to be Christ.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way, without the Spirit, we misunderstand Jubilees.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: The author was talking about the Jewish people being the offspring of Abraham, the ones who will inherit the kingdom, and that they are not allowed to even associate with anyone who doesn't keep the law of God.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true, we shouldn't associate ourselves with people who continually ignore God's law of selfless love but still call themselves Christians.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_00: But God shows us what this passage in Jubilees is really about.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The spiritual meaning is that Jesus came, redeemed us all, and will eventually cleanse us all because he is the offspring of Abraham.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And now, in the words of Peter, we have been shown not to call anyone common or unclean.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you lived at the time of Peter and heard him and Paul and all the disciples talking about that, wouldn't you think that was good news too?
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And based on the amount of time I've gone, we're gonna pause there and save the rest for next week.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: There are a few more things we need to talk about.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: For now, let's walk in the light.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not so silent.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_03: I just that's my I it makes so much sense.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, as a as an evangel ex-vangelical, here's a new word for you.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: I just think I remember learning about the 400 years of silence and the gap between Malachi and the teachings of Jesus being roughly that amount of time and thinking, why would God do that?
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's because the Jews.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_03: You know, but it never made sense as a quote, Gentile for me.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_03: It just never made sense.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_03: Why would he go silent for so long?
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then I start thinking, okay, what was going on in the world in those 400 years?
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_03: What else, what else was going on?
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_03: Is that when Buddha was focusing on his teachings and taking care of the poor, you know, all his whole emphasis and his message of caring for others?
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that would have been around the beginning of that 400-year gap because he witnessed the Israelites, he saw their hypocrisy.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we talked about this in episode Oh, that's right.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Buddhism episode.
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Israel claimed to worship one God, but then went to altars to worship all kinds of gods, and the first Buddha, Sid, actually talks about them directly.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he witnessed that and decided he didn't want to believe in a god like that.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so was that around the same time that God told Ezekiel he would only speak to the Zatekites?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Around the same time.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, nobody knows the dates for sure.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like the the dates of Buddha.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it was around that same time.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on in the 400-year gap, we had um the Greeks, Alexander the Great came and conquered Jerusalem and all that stuff.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: So all that was going on too.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was just thinking about that verse in Ezekiel that you mentioned, you know, the Pharisees knew these scriptures as well.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_03: So they knew what this verse said that God would speak to and through the Zadekites.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, well, the Pharisees as an official sect didn't come around until later.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, they knew the verses.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the the Sadducees were claiming to be Zadekites too.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very complicated.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the short story is that the Sadducees had control of the temple, and they were very corrupt.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Both the Essenes and the Pharisees believed that.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: They pretty much the Sadducees pretty much rejected every writing and oral law.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: They only accepted the Torah, and that's probably because I mean the prophets were talking about people like them.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_00: But they also didn't believe in the spiritual realm or the afterlife.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_00: So even though the beliefs of the Pharisees aligned more with the beliefs of the Essenes, the Pharisees stayed within the system in Jerusalem and they interacted with the f the Sadducees, and they made alliances with them, even though they really didn't like them.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes were considered extreme in a bad way, if you enjoyed money and power and comfort.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: But in a good way, if you consider what God asks of us, which is to abandon self, which is exactly what they did.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with the Pharisees was that they didn't walk the talk.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like their beliefs were not the problem.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were very haughty and loved power.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_00: They were the pastors, they were the leaders of the synagogues.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: They also focused on obedience to rules rather than the meaning behind the rules.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you read Matthew 23, you get a picture of what Jesus thought of them.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, Yeah, you know, do what they teach you to do, but don't do what they do.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't necessarily the beliefs of the Pharisees that were the problem.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was their leadership and their hypocrisy.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_03: And did the Pharisees think they were part of the Zadekite group?
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_03: So they knew those verses were not talking to them.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: They the Pharisees were not in the temple.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was the Sadducees.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and then I'm thinking about our canon.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you said our 66 book canon, specifically the Old Testament section of it, it's based on the fact that the Pharisees had chose to accept or reject certain texts.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how we ended up with what we have.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I just think ah, no fair, ouch.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And all of those books that the Pharisees accepted were accepted by the Essenes as well.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the Pharisees rejected the ones during the intertestamental period because those basically called out their corruption.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: It called out all of the other Jews.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes were saying, everything we're doing is corrupt.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get back to what God wants.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they wrote First Enoch, they wrote Jubilees.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't called Essenes at the time those books were written, but it's the same people, the same mindset that led to the sect of the Essenes.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and I just feel like I'm getting all these pieces to a puzzle that I didn't really realize was needing to be put together.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like the fact that the Pharisees were part of the process of determining the Old Testament portion of the canon.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then moving into the fact that the way the Pharisees are portrayed in the New Testament is pretty negative.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_03: And then that view of the Pharisees trickles into how you're raised as a kid in the church, you're just like, oh, those Pharisees.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's a whole song, you know, you don't want to be a Pharisee, right?
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_03: So when you think about the council, I know there were multiple councils that decided on the canon, but when you think about those people, did they not realize?
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_03: Did they not know or acknowledge or understand the motivations of these Pharisees slash, you know, Orthodox Jews?
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_03: The fact that the this people group that is viewed negatively by your New Testament is the one that decided and chose your Old Testament books.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the councils that chose the canon were corrupt, too.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_02: So they were like Pharisees, too.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Council of Rome was led by Pope Damasus, who murdered a couple hundred people to become Pope.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then he appointed Jerome to translate the canon.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jerome worked with the rabbinic Jews at the time, which came from the Pharisee tradition.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_03: So that influence right there, yeah, from the start.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And back when the Essenes were around, nobody took them seriously except Jesus and his disciples, anyway.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same story repeating itself of all the prophets that were ignored.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, many Christians argue that we know what books go in the Old Testament because we know what the Jews of the time accepted as canonical when we decided on our canon.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that sentence sounds very familiar.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_03: That logic is what I was taught.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a problem there.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because the rabbinic Jewish system that existed post-Jesus, so after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, it was based entirely on the Pharisees of the second temple Judaism.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody bothers to question this whole process.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_00: At least, no evangelicals.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_00: We just blindly believe that all these people were inspired by the Spirit to choose our canon.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I have no problem with any of the ones they chose, just like the Pharisees didn't.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is with the ones you left out.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you want to go back in time and ask, so let me get this right.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_00: You relied on the Pharisees to decide what books to put in the Old Testament, and then decided on books in your New Testament that talk about the Pharisees the way it does.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's so it makes me feel like I left, you know.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, we missed out on such good stuff.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody left their brain at home that day.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_03: Well, now we're now we're unearthing it, though.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_03: Now we're digging into it.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_03: So well, and speaking of digging, you did all that digging into the meaning of Malachi and how it means my messenger, and all the evidence that points to the fact that Ezra wrote Malachi.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_03: So why don't why is that not something that we hear in evangelical circles?
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because we have created a system, or evangelicals have created a system for themselves that doesn't allow them to be wrong on pretty much anything.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're either right or their religion doesn't exist.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about it all comes back to inerrancy.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_00: But but not in a good way.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Admitting that Malachi wasn't an actual prophet would take a humility that they don't have, and it would dispute the literal reading of their English translations.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_00: They say that the Bible is inerrant, like with without error, but how that plays out practically is that their interpretations of their translations are inerrant.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, they're not really placing this concept of inerrancy on the Bible, like the original manuscripts, which don't exist.
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're placing it on their own understanding.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about self.
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're not willing to have open minds because that would mean their minds aren't the best in the first place.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's pride.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_00: But the more information people have, the more evangelicalism is in danger.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because, as Diana Butler Bass put it, evangelicalism is a Jenga tower that's ready to collapse.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It all started with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which evangelicals say is great because it shows the accuracy of our current canon, but then they ignore all the other evidence, like Enoch and Jubilees, as if it wasn't even there.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, common everyday people aren't as stupid as some pastors and scholars think.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_00: They can see through this.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: The information just needs to get out.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a Southern Baptist pastor last week post on Facebook, and he said that people who get their theology degrees from YouTube shouldn't be correcting pastors.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And my first thought was wait a minute, don't you post your stuff on YouTube?
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_03: Oh.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So people shouldn't be listening to you.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's that old school way of thinking if it's on the internet, it's not real.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is on the internet right now.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_00: You don't equate learning on the internet to being false.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: It can be, but he's on YouTube too.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: But his point, I guess, was that he has the answers and the common folk don't.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have about 10 passages or so that I would love to see him give a sermon on about Jesus choosing uneducated common men.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: 1 Corinthians 1 27, for example, says, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_00: God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't be so quick to claim that non-pastors can't correct pastors, because God may decide to call you out on that.
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, speaking of uneducated common person, that makes me think of our bro Peter.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was a bit rough around the edges.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_03: And well, and from what I'm understanding from what you taught, one of the reasons why evangelicals, whoever, scholars reject Jubilees is this idea that Jews weren't allowed to associate with Gentiles at all.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_03: But Peter's change of mind right as as he thinks about what he has read and been taught, he too is somewhat rejecting what it's what it says in Jubilees with Cornelius.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when when he said, you know, I No, he wasn't rejecting Jubilees any more than Jesus was rejecting the Old Testament.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean Jesus clarified the law.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't reject it.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_00: He said that people misunderstood it and that they focused on the literal rather than the true meaning.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter did the same thing, but with the Spirit, God's help, Peter finally understood what it was about.
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because it wasn't about Jew versus Gentile, like the Jews rejecting Gentiles.
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was about selfless love versus pride.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_00: You shouldn't be associated with unloving people.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Proud people who only want the best for themselves.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_00: What it means is distance yourself from that.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, that we understand that's definitely the teaching of Jesus.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_03: I guess Pharisees would be the ones saying, this is the law.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_03: You must not associate.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the Essenes were saying that too.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying that the Spirit comes along and teaches us what it really means.
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter finally got it and he was like, oh, I'm not supposed to call anybody unclean.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so then again, viewing this sacred text through the spirit.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you see that.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_03: I had to rack my brain to try to remember the first time I heard about the Essenes because it doesn't seem like it was something that was taught in my Old Testament, New Testament survey class.
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_03: I went to a private Christian college, liberal arts college, you know, and so you had these core required classes.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_03: Old Testament survey was one of them.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_03: I ate it up.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_03: I loved it because I love history classes.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't remember.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're not going to get that in basic level religion courses or Bible courses.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_03: Pharisees, Sadducees, check.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_03: All those boxes checked off.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_03: But Essens, I'm like, I don't know.
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_03: The first time I heard about that group.
• 1:30:20
  SPEAKER_00: You will learn about it in seminary, but even then, not much.
• 1:30:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you really have to specialize in apocryphal writings and stuff to learn about Enoch and Jubilees.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and I we had a really cool book in Old Testament, New Testament survey, you know, two separate semesters, but lots of pictures.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_03: I do remember there was a section about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_03: How do you say it?
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:44
  SPEAKER_03: I always want to say cumin.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_03: But never, to the best of my ability of remembering, was the people group taught about or expound or expanded upon, you know?
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, one of the reasons is that we don't know a whole lot about the Essenes.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: At least the, you know, as a as a group or a whole.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Most of what we know comes from Pliny the Elder, Philo, uh Josephus, and like you said, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Pliny didn't say much, but he did say where the Essenes lived, which was where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found later on.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_00: He also estimated the Essenes to be around 4,000 people, which is about the same as the Pharisees.
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Philo loved the Essenes.
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_00: He presented them as the ideal model of Jewish virtue.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Josephus actually numbered the Essenes fewer than Pliny at around 2,000 people, but still way more than the Sadducees.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_00: But Josephus also credited them with exceptional skills in prophecy and healing.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_00: All of these people were in the first century.
• 1:32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like Pliny and Philo were, they were born around 20 AD or so.
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Josephus, uh, he wrote his stuff later than that, but still all within the first century.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_00: But even with the three of them, most of our knowledge about the Essenes comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, unfortunately, by the time we found those scrolls, our doctrines and beliefs were pretty well established, like in stone for fundamentalists or evangelicals.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't want to re-examine those beliefs because change is hard.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at all the evidence, the parallels between the gospel of Christ and the Essing community, they're just there's simply too much to ignore.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_00: In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul talks about our bodies being the temple of God.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 16 says, Do you not know that you're God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you?
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, most people say that Paul was the first to voice that concept, but what you probably didn't know or realize is that the Essenes are the first ones to come up with it, which is just one of the many comparisons we see between the New Testament and the Essenes.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the spiritual metaphor that these Essenes were living out included a very strict set of rules.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_00: These rules were written down in what is called the community rules or the manual of discipline.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_00: There were 13 copies of it in Qumran, making it one of the 10 scrolls that had more than 10 copies.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_00: We had the Torah, then the Psalms, and Isaiah, and then we had Enoch Jubilees, and then this one.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when the Essenes decided what they needed to do, which was to move out into the desert, this rule book was created as part of their prep for the move.
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_00: But in this rule book, it says that the community itself is the spiritual temple where God dwells, replacing the temple in Jerusalem because it had been corrupted.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Their lives were to be a quote living temple.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_00: They called the community a true distinctive temple, a veritable holy of holies, and said that they would be a household of integrity and truth.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is the stuff that they agreed on while forming the group before they moved out into the desert, which the concept we see here is mirrored in what Paul says.
• 1:34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this holy temple, the community of Essenes, were led by a council of leaders.
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_00: The council was made up of twelve men, three of whom were Zadekite priests.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think of this as the twelve disciples, including Peter, James, and John, the three that Jesus brought with him to his most pivotal moments.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was Christ's inner circle.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_00: But chapter eight, seven through eight of this community rule book says of this council, quote, It is the tested wall, the precious cornerstone.
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Its foundations shall not shake or move from their place.
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the Essenes spoke of the living temple and the cornerstone.
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Jewish theology, the cornerstone or the foundation stone was not literally a foundation stone.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually the summit of a natural mountain bedrock on the temple mount.
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the top of the cornerstone was where the Ark of the Covenant rested.
• 1:36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that that was inside the Holy of Holies, where the presence of God dwelled.
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's where they spoke with God.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the temple and the cornerstone were not the only parallels we see in the Essene community.
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than offering animal sacrifices, the Essenes offered holy living as their sacrifice to God.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_00: They also practiced regular baptism of repentance.
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the baptism didn't grant repentance.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, inner repentance was a prerequisite for the water to have any effect.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So without a pure heart, it was useless.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_00: To them, the water was just a symbol of God's Spirit.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that echoed in what John the Baptist did.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because he was yelling out, I baptize with water, but he will baptize with spirit and fire.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes also practiced communal living and sharing of wealth, something that was later taught by Jesus Himself.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we see it played out in the early believers, in the early church.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Essenes also talked about sons of light and sons of darkness, which we see in 1 Thessalonians 5 and John 12, really all throughout the Gospel of John.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many other parallels, but even with those parallels, no metaphor is perfect.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_00: We say over and over on this podcast all the time, don't overanalyze the analogy.
• 1:37:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the essay's and that metaphor that they were living are no exception to that rule.
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know to what extent that they knew, if at all, what they were doing in terms of prophecy.
• 1:37:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I do know that God tells his stories through prophets in some very weird ways.
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I also know that many prophets even questioned God's methods, like Habakkuk, Jonah, and Jeremiah.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jeremiah was sick of being a laughingstock.
• 1:38:15
  SPEAKER_00: The prophets knew to be obedient, but they didn't know why.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_00: They very seldom knew why.
• 1:38:23
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know what it meant or when it would come about.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_00: God only told them what they needed to know, the truth of which would be revealed later.
• 1:38:35
  SPEAKER_00: In Daniel 8, Daniel was given a vision and he didn't understand it.
• 1:38:41
  SPEAKER_00: So Gabriel came to help him understand.
• 1:38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then after Gabriel explained it, Daniel says in verse 27, And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days.
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then I rose and went about the king's business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then later Daniel gets another one about the end times.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when it was over, he said, in Daniel 12, 8 through 9, he said, I heard, but I did not understand.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then I said, Oh my Lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord said, Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_00: So basically God told him, It's none of your business yet.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then Daniel wrote it down for us to read, not knowing what it meant.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament confirms that even though the prophets were obedient, they didn't know the meaning behind what they were doing.
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_00: In Ephesians 3, 4 through 5, Paul says, When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_00: In 1 Peter 1 10 through 12, Peter said, Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours, searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating, when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels longed to look.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the prophets were not serving themselves, but you because the Holy Spirit now announces what he wants.
• 1:41:18
  SPEAKER_00: If this was how God operated with the prophets leading up to Christ, why would he do it differently with the Essenes?
• 1:41:28
  SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_00: We know through the book of Ezekiel that God chose the Zadekites as the only ones he would communicate with moving forward, into what we ignorantly call the 400 silent years.
• 1:41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the Essenes claimed to be the true Zadekites.
• 1:41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, based on Ezra and the book of Malachi, I believe the Essenes on that.
• 1:41:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the Essenes obeyed, not knowing what God was doing.
• 1:42:01
  SPEAKER_00: But what they did paved the way for God to change the world, making you his temple, and making Christ the cornerstone.
• 1:42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now his spirit is how we speak with God.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to give the Essenes back the title they deserve.
• 1:42:28
  SPEAKER_00: They are prophets of God.
• 1:42:32
  SPEAKER_00: God didn't abandon humanity between four hundred BC and when Jesus was born.
• 1:42:40
  SPEAKER_00: But just like in those four hundred silent years, today God is still speaking.
• 1:42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Don't make the same mistake as these intertestamental Jews.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Open your heart and listen.
• 1:42:59
  SPEAKER_00: The song for this week is called This Is a Move by Brandon Lake.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_00: He sings Mountains are still being moved.
• 1:43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Strongholds are still being loosed.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_00: Bodies are still being raised.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Giants are still being slayed.
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_00: We believe it.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_00: We can see that wonders are still what you do.
• 1:43:25
  SPEAKER_00: We are here for you.
• 1:43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Come and do what you do.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Set our hearts on you.
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Come and do what you do because we need a move.
• 1:43:39
  SPEAKER_00: Next week, we'll finish our study on Jubilees.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at a couple more assumed contradictions, and we'll see what Jubilee says about Enoch, the Watchers, and the demons.
• 1:43:54
  SPEAKER_00: How did the Watchers' teachings about sorcery live on past Noah?
• 1:44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And how did the concept of a thousand years being a day in creation influence the disciples?
• 1:44:10
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next week.
• 1:44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
• 1:44:14
  SPEAKER_04: Bye.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.