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Covenants and Promises, Part 1: Escaping the Covenant · The Bible in 3D

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Greetings. Welcome to the Bible in three d. This is your host, Andrew. We are in a series entitled Hot Topics. In the Old Testament, Covenants and Promises.
• 0:20
  And again, we ask, you know, why is this a hot topic? Even though these covenants and promises were made maybe four thousand, three thousand, a thousand years ago, They're very pertinent today because this is what is happening in the The Middle East. It all goes back to these covenants and these promises. It's interesting and perhaps you've seen this, I worked with a lot of people who are professionals in many different professions. It's always amazing to me to meet some older person, let's say in their sixties, you know, who's who's clearly agnostic, they don't particularly believe or disbelieve in God, they just don't care.
• 1:07
  And then as I get to know them, I find out, for instance I knew one person who was a tax attorney and she knew I was a Christian so she said well, what are you doing for Easter? And so you know, it's a family time, okay? She says you know when I was a little girl in West Texas, she said, oh, I loved the sunrise service at Easter. Well, turns out she grew up in Southern Baptist Church in West Texas. Grew up, went to college and just simply walked away.
• 1:40
  Walked away from the faith. She hasn't owned a Bible in forty forty five years, you know. That happens with many people when they leave home that say they grew up in a family that's religious or observant or faithful or however you use it. And then they get to the university and they realize, oh, I really like ham and cheese sandwiches. I don't think I want to eat kosher anymore or maybe it's halal.
• 2:11
  Now just to make sure this is even, know, Southern Baptists have a dietary law too, you know. You didn't know that? Yeah, they do. Now this was told to me by Southern Baptists. We don't smoke, drink or chew or go with girls who do.
• 2:29
  Okay, so that is their dietary restrictions. And yet most Southern Baptists I know did all three of those things. Okay, sorry, maybe they didn't go with girls who chewed, I don't know. Chewed tobacco, right? The point is that it happens in every religion and it happened in Judaism.
• 2:52
  Many young men grew up and went off to university and they liked what they saw. They liked the ham and cheese sandwiches. They liked to go out with these shixes, that's the derogatory word for Gentile girls. Know? And they kind of turned their back on their...
• 3:14
  They did not observe any form of Judaism after they got into the world on their own. Now, you know, they ate kosher when they went back and visited mama or grandma but other than that, very, we would say assimilated. So I mean this happens in all religions, okay, to many people. Most people who turn their back on their religion, they don't think anything more about it. Like my friend, the tax attorney, never gave her a day of remorse after she walked away at university.
• 3:52
  But some people, some people feel guilty. You know, I really enjoy this ham and cheese sandwich but I feel guilty because I know it's not kosher. Or gee, I really enjoy this beer but I shouldn't drink it. Those people who feel guilty sometimes become the most ardent opponents of the very religion they came from. Somehow that assuages their conscience if they now attack the very religion or background that they came from.
• 4:29
  So I am going to now talk about three ways that Jews have attacked the covenant of Moses. They do not want to be under the law of Moses because as we pointed out there are blessings and curses. So if you're out there and you're a non observant Jew, you feel guilty because there are curses when you don't honor God under the covenant which you were sworn to? Well I wasn't sworn to it. Some people would say well you had a bar mitzvah.
• 5:14
  Bar mitzvah just means son of the law, bat mitzvah means daughter of the law and again these are not a ceremony that suddenly puts you under the covenant, these are a ceremony for girls when they turn 12, for a boy when he turns 13. That is really the age of majority under the law of Moses. And it just recognizes that now you are responsible for yourself. It doesn't make you responsible, it just is a ceremony to recognize that you have passed the age point where you're automatically now responsible. And as again, some people are guilty about this, they attack it.
• 6:02
  And today we're gonna look at three ways which they attack essentially this Mosaic covenant. And these are all Ashkenazi Jews. We'll flesh out that term Ashkenazi here in a bit. So these are all Jewish men who wanted to assimilate and felt guilty about it and so here's how they attack the Mosaic covenant. We're gonna look at Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Velikovsky, we're gonna look at Arthur Kussler and Shlomo Sand.
• 6:44
  So the last two kind of present one of the three attacks on the Mosaic Law, the Mosaic Covenant, let's say. Sigmund Freud is the father of psychology, modern psychology, the first psychoanalyst. And he he went to university, I believe, in Vienna, he settled in Vienna, Austria. And that's where he developed, you know, all the psychology stuff. And so he was dealing with all kinds of people who had guilt and remorse and things in their past and he was working through that and, you know, kind of the first guy ever.
• 7:23
  What is so ironic is that he had more guilt than anybody he worked with. He had guilt because he was not an observant Jew. And this was tormenting him and at the end of his life he he wrote a book about Moses and the law and it's about Akhenaten and you go Akhenaten, is that a Jewish name? No, not at all. In the eighteen hundreds a city, I mean they knew there was a city out there, it's actually South Of Thebes which is now modern day Karnak.
• 8:08
  Thebes had been the capital of Egypt for, you know, thousands of years and suddenly there was a new city built quite a bit South of Thebes, it was built in the desert right along the bank of the Nile River. People began exploring that in the late eighteen hundred's, really got going in the early nineteen hundred's and everything kind of stopped when World War I came along. But what was obvious is there was this huge city there. It hadn't been destroyed, it had been abandoned and pretty much covered up with sand. As they got into it they realized that this was a pretty big city and the name of this city today we call it Amarna.
• 8:59
  There was another Egyptian name which I can't pronounce but today if you say Amarna people will know what you're talking about. So they go into the history books and they look and there is no Amarna. They look in the maps, there is no Armana. And yet this is a big city. Well, they keep digging and pretty soon they discover it's the capital that this pharaoh moved the capital from Thebes into the desert and built a city.
• 9:30
  Now initially this guy's name was pharaoh Amenhotep the fourth in the eighteenth dynasty. Why did he move the capital? Well, this guy, Amen Hot Top the fourth decided that all of the Egyptian gods were false, they were just idols, it was all mythology, so he did away with that and he came up with a new religion. And he said there was only one God and this was Aten, that's how he pronounced it, how I'm gonna pronounce it. And he is represented by the sun.
• 10:07
  He's not the sun, the sun is not God, but that's a symbol. And there's just one God. Well, the Yugesian priests are going crazy because, you know, they've got a lock on a lot of things because they're priests and you gotta go to them for, you know, all your religious issues. And all of a sudden they come up with a new religion and they don't agree with it, so he says, this is now Amenhotep the fourth, he goes, well, I'm out of here. I'm just gonna build a new city and you're not welcome Egyptian priests.
• 10:39
  And he does. And he creates this whole temple for Aten and he changes his name to Akhenaten. So from Amenhotep the fourth to Akhenaten. And, you know, everybody's gotta worship this one God, Aten. This is now a key issue for Sigmund Freud.
• 11:03
  The story that we understand as they're excavating all this, it's absolutely incredible. And they find a bust of his primary wife, the primary queen and it's Queen Nefertiti, you may have heard the name. If you have never seen the bust of Nefertiti, go on the Internet, go to Wikipedia, go to Google and look it up. They found this at Armana. Armana.
• 11:40
  They found this and today it is in a museum in Germany and it's the only thing in museum. Why? Because people who look at it say this was one of the most beautiful women in all of human history. So you got to see it for that reason. They're a pretty interesting couple.
• 12:03
  This Akhenaten does a lot of weird things and we'll cover a lot of that when we get into our series on Moses. Anyway, he's there, got this new worship and it's against the law to worship the old gods. At some point Akhenaten dies. Nefertiti is around for a little bit and then she dies. And there's a son, it's not her son, she never had any male children.
• 12:38
  Akhenaten has a male child by a concubine or lesser wife. And so this young boy, they make him pharaoh and so he's there at Amarna and Bazir, okay, this is like the guy in charge under the pharaoh, is a guy named I. And the Egyptian priest from Thebes come to I and go hey hey, look look, let's make a deal. Bring the boy pharaoh back to Thebes and reintroduce the old religion and we'll make it worth your wild wink wink wink. So I says good and so he says to the boy, okay, we're gonna go back to Thebes, we're gonna go back to the old religion, you know, and the kid goes along.
• 13:28
  What's he gonna do? He's a kid. Well, he gets back to Thebes and he does all the things he's supposed to do or at least what he's told to do, you know, they rescind the new religion, they bring in the old religion and then, and you'll be surprised at this, the boy dies. Was it an accident? Was he killed?
• 13:49
  That's highly debated even today. We've got his mummy and it's not clear. Do you know who this boy's name was? You do. King Tutut Kamun.
• 14:06
  Actually, the name that his father Akhenaten gave him was different but when he moved to Thebes, they changed his name so that was honoring to an Egyptian god, Amun. And you'll never believe this. Guess who is made pharaoh after Tutankhamun dies suddenly as an 18 year old? Yep. I.
• 14:32
  I becomes the new pharaoh. Who would have thought, right? So that is what has come out of the archaeology. If you have not looked up Akhenaten, he's referred to as the heretic pharaoh. His name was removed from the history.
• 14:55
  Everything that they could find later pharaohs destroyed. They took his name out of the history books. They just simply, you know, they ignore him. You know, it goes from his father to King Tut and he's just simply left out because he's this heretic. And of course the city of Amarna is completely forgotten and written out of the history book.
• 15:20
  It's just not there. Well, Freud gets a hold of this story and he goes, And this is the story that he globs onto and then he kind of rewrites it. And so what he says is, well, Akhenaten is the first monotheist, the first person ever to worship one God. Excuse me Sigmund, did you not read in Genesis about Abraham? Well, again he's feeling guilty so he has to justify this and so he writes a book and he speaks about this everywhere at the end of his life.
• 16:04
  And so what he says is there was no Moses. There there was no Hebrew name Moses. The Aten religion had Egyptians who were priests of Aten. The man we call Moses was simply a priest of Aten. After Akhenaten dies, after Nefertiti dies or whatever happened to her, we're still not sure, and then you know they moved back to Thebes, To be a priest of Aten is not a good place to be and so he heads towards Canaan, this priest of Aten.
• 16:48
  And he's got all of these followers and he's teaching about one God and at some point they kill him, then they feel bad and then they reconstruct everything that he's taught and then this is Moses. Okay? So the argument that Sigmund Freud has is there really wasn't any Moses, there was a person we call Moses and there really wasn't any God and so everything was simply made up and it all comes from the cult of Akhenaten. And you're going, really? Yes.
• 17:28
  That is still around today and I'll show you why that's still around today but we'll have to wait a little later. But essentially the timeline that secular people today say is there is no Moses, there never was. There is no God, you know. Below us there isn't no hell, above us there's only sky, okay? Imagine, you know, John went in.
• 17:56
  They say there is no Moses but if there was, he had to come later than Akhenaten because the man we call Moses whether he was Palestinian or whether Jewish, Hebrew, whatever he was, Egyptian, he got all his ideas from Akhenaten. Therefore, the Mosaic covenant is just a myth. And that's what secular people today would say is that Judaism, the law of Moses, Mosaic covenant came from something that this heretic pharaoh Akhenaten did. Therefore, I'm not under the covenant. The Mosaic covenant with its curses and blessings doesn't apply because it's all fiction, therefore that assuages my guilt.
• 18:51
  And now I wanna talk to all my Jewish friends to tell them that they can walk away too. Again, that is in modified form that that is essentially the argument that the secular people of the world today say. There is no Moses but if there was, he just got it all from Akhenat. Now we know Sigmund Freud just made that all up. One of the things though which is a glaring error in his argument is if Moses came a hundred years after Akhenaten during the time of the nineteenth dynasty, Ramses the second, think Cecil B.
• 19:32
  DeMille's and his 1939 blockbuster 10 Commandments. That's what he said. Well, if that's true, there's no way Moses a hundred years later would have known anything about Akhenaten because the later pharaoh simply scrubbed him out. There was no evidence, there was no writing, there was nothing about Akhenaten a hundred years later, It had all been covered up because they were embarrassed and ashamed. But again, very popular argument in its essential form with the secular people today.
• 20:09
  And if you're Jewish and you don't want to be under the covenant, that's one way. Let's now look at a second way. This is a guy named Emmanuel Velikovsky. Interesting, he was also a psychoanalyst but he was a generation younger than Freud. And he became an amateur astrophysicist and an amateur astronomer.
• 20:38
  He would not say there wasn't a Moses. What he said was yeah there was a Moses but there wasn't any God. So Moses just made all this stuff up. What about all the 10 plagues, the parting of the Red Sea and da da da da da da? He goes, well, this is amateur astrophysicist.
• 21:02
  He comes up with this theory and he writes a book. Now when I was a kid, I was very much interested in science fiction, one of my buddies, a lot of us were back then. And I'd read all the three great fathers of science fiction and somebody said, well, you should read Emmanuel Belikovsky, Worlds in Collision. So I read it as science fiction. He wrote it as truth.
• 21:27
  So this guy who was self taught in all of these professions He said, oh about fourteen hundred fifteen hundred BC somewhere in there, there was a disturbance in the force and Jupiter ejected a a meteorite, a comet, meteorite, something. So this giant gas planet ejects this huge ball which he said eventually becomes, catch this, the planet Venus. I'm not making this up, this is what he wrote. So we've got this this planet that's not in an orbit, this is kinda, you know, tooling through the solar system and it passes close to Earth. And this is what caused all of the 10 plagues including the parting of the Red Sea.
• 22:27
  And as it flew over it made a noise and the noise sounded like the word Yahweh. Okay. I'm laughing but this guy was serious and of course every professional astronomer, every professor that you know had a teaching gig at some university, they all said, oh he's a crackpot. But you see that's a second way to say I don't have to follow the Mosaic covenant because this guy Moses, whoever it was, just made it up. Yeah, there was Palestinians or Hebrews or Jews, yeah, there were those people and maybe somebody you know was you know, the head guy there for all these people and...
• 23:18
  But he didn't do anything by God's power. He wasn't commissioned by God, there was no God, there was no Mosaic covenant. So I don't have to feel guilty about not following the Mosaic covenant. Okay. Let's go to the third group now.
• 23:37
  And as I do that, let's go back to Abraham. Remember chapter 15? God says I give you this covenant and it's eternal for you and your descendants after you. We know in Scripture we have this cryptic thing that the Lord says in Revelation. Not everybody who says they are a Jew is a Jew.
• 24:13
  What does that mean? It could mean many things. But it was certainly, I don't say common, but it was known among the Ashkenazi Jews that there were some issues. Many of them perhaps were not descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were conversos.
• 24:39
  So these are people who converted to Judaism. Or at least their ancestors converted to Judaism. You say that's crazy. I'm going to start Shlomo sien. He was a professor, PhD at the University of Tel Aviv and his specialty was history and European history and in particular French history.
• 25:05
  And you know, we've got the young nation, the political entity known as Israel. I think it started in what, 1948. And you know he's in Tel Aviv and he's teaching and he's struggling with what he knows as a professional PhD in history, applying that to what people are saying about the history of Israel. Now why is it important? Zionists.
• 25:39
  These are people who wanted to create a state for Jews in The Middle East and so there... Every people have these mythic origins, know, like okay George Washington, I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree, you know. I'm sure that did not happen, But everybody has some mythic things in their history or things that were stretched. The founding of the nation state of Israel is based in part on the money from the Rothschilds, okay, actually most of it, and it's also on this idea that the Jews are coming home. The Jews are coming home.
• 26:29
  So we have all of these Jews who have been forced into exile over all these years, and they are simply coming home to reclaim what was given to their ancestors. So Shlomo sans says the idea here is that the Jews were sent into exile first when seven twenty one BC, I won't say Jews, Israelites, were sent into exile by the Assyrians and they're lost today or they're somewhere. Debate about all that. Okay, and then in between 06/2005 and five eighty six BC, the Babylonians take those who are in Judah, mostly Jews but some other people from some other tribes as well including some of the Benjaminites and the folks from Reuben. And not all of them come back.
• 27:30
  Alright, at some point they do come back, they try to rebuild the state of Israel and there's a rebellion in sixty six-seventy AD and many people are killed. But they don't leave. They're they're still there. They're just kind of in a bad state after the Romans destroy everything. And so they rise up again and it's called the Bar Kokhba revolt and it's in 132 to one hundred thirty six AD.
• 28:08
  And this is the most devastating the rebellions because the Roman Empire just decimates the country. The Jewish belief is that know whatever a million people are killed and everybody else is deported. They're sent into exile. And these are the people that are coming... These are the ancestors of the people that are coming home.
• 28:35
  And Shalom O'Santis, there's no evidence of that. There is no evidence at all that anybody was sent into exile. Now, yeah, there was depopulation, near total depopulation, there was mass killings, there was enslavement, but you know there is no evidence anywhere in historical records that these people were deported, were exiled. So what happened to them all? They were just Jews.
• 29:08
  And Shlomo sans, as you know, Islam came in, they converted to become Muslims and those are the Palestinians today. Well what about all these people that are coming in from Europe? We refer to or they refer to themselves as Ashkenazi Jews. They come from Europe. And he says they're conversos.
• 29:39
  These are people in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe who converted to Judaism. And in particular he picks up the Khazars. Now I'm gonna go to Arthur Kussler. Obviously Shlomo san is very controversial but it was in house, you know. This was in the Jewish community, right?
• 30:07
  What Kussler did, he actually came out a little bit earlier than Shlomo San, but he exposed this next theory to the Gentile world. Up until that time Gentiles were kind of oblivious to this. The Ashkenazi Jews were aware of it. There was a kingdom between about six hundred and nine hundred AD in what is Ukraine and between the Kasmin and Black Sea basically setting on top of the caravan trade. And basically these were robber barons and they were constantly terrorizing the caravans that were coming, you know, headed to China, coming back to Europe and all that.
• 30:54
  And they were very immoral, dishonest people and how the story goes is that at some point the Russian emperor or whatever he was takes the king of the Khazars aside and he says you gotta clean up your act and you have to choose, you have to choose to be one of the major religions, you know. And so Soekos, the king of Khazaria, interviews a Jewish rabbi, a Roman Catholic and then I believe he's Roman, it could have been orthodox, and then a Muslim imam I guess. Anyway, after all the interviews and questioning, he decides that he is and the nobility are gonna convert to Judaism. And of course by and by if the king goes then everybody else converts. Arthur Kussler in 1976 wrote a book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe.
• 31:58
  Now there's only 12 tribes, right? The 12 sons of Jacob. He says we, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, we are not descended from the 12 tribes, we're from the thirteenth tribe, we're from these conversos back in Khazaria between six hundred and nine hundred AD. Now that's preposterous right? That's crazy, crazy cuckoo.
• 32:25
  Now he ostensibly says the reason he wrote this book was to do away with anti Semitism. What he says publicly is well, the people discriminate against Jews because they think we're a different race. This is actually we're not, we're European, Yiddish is not from German although they used to tell us that. We now agree that it's a Turkic Mongolic type of language, it's more Turkic. And we're really a Turkic people, that's our background, we just happen to convert.
• 33:03
  So we're just like other Europeans. I don't see how that was gonna fly actually, that argument. Now that's what he said publicly. I think he again was trying to find a way not to be under the covenant. Now if we go back to Deuteronomy, the people committed to the covenant a second time and Moses says okay, it's gonna be binding on you who are standing here and you who are here but not standing here.
• 33:35
  In other words, your descendants. Well, I I don't come from those people. I came from a converso. So maybe it was binding on my my ancestor from seven hundred AD because he decided to become Jewish as a religion but, you know, it's not binding on me so I don't have to worry about it. Now that's interesting.
• 34:01
  If were to talk to a Talmudic rabbi today, they would say the Mosaic Law is still active, it still applies to you whether you agreed to it or not. You were descended from the people who agreed, therefore it applies to you or you descended from a converso and if you descended from a converso then it applies to you as well. Okay, those are rules they made up. That's not in the Mosaic Law. So we got three ways of dealing with I don't wanna be under the law.
• 34:43
  Now we as Christians and I will talk about how we see the Mosaic Law that was temporary, it was fulfilled in Christ, we'll go through that, we'll go through the verses. I do believe that the covenant with Abraham though, I think that was everlasting and eternal. Well what does that mean? Now we get into some hard stuff as if what we did already wasn't hard, right? If we go back to Genesis, we can see the covenant with Abraham is laid out in three steps.
• 35:22
  Chapter 12, chapter 15 and chapter 17. Chapter 15, God says, you know, I'm making this covenant with you everlasting with you and your descendants. Okay, that work if I'm a converso or the ancestor of a converso? Then say that. The Talmudic Jews would say yes.
• 35:50
  I don't know. But it also says you get the land from the major river in Egypt, which is what? It's the Nile River, all the way to the River Euphrates. That is Greater Israel. That's like it's like a whole everything.
• 36:08
  So the people who are leading Israel today would say, okay, we've got that, we have that covenant with God so we are entitled to the land from the Nile River to the Euphrates River. And of course the Palestinians say, yeah but we're actually the descendants of those people and you're not. You're descendants of the conversos, the Khazars. Now it's not just the Khazars, Shlomo san pointed out, I mean there's been a lot of conversion going on for a long time with other groups as well. Now even though Talmudic rabbis would say, okay, even though you're a descendant of a converso, you know, all these covenants, the blessings, curses all apply to you.
• 37:02
  I don't know. Did I say this was a hot topic? Did I say it was conversial, controversial? I'm gonna set this up for next time by saying I think Sigmund Freud, I think it just was filled with guilt made up something. Emmanuel Velikovsky is very interesting and he has said some things which later turned out to be true and everybody said well he was lucky.
• 37:30
  Well, I think he was lucky and crazy all at the same time. I'm not sure what to think of Arthur Kussler and Shlomo Sand and some of those guys. I don't know what all that means. Most Christian ministries will side with the Jewish people and say none of that's true. Well, I know they don't want it to be true, I don't know.
• 37:52
  I just throw that out to you. Anyway, so we have people with all kinds of myths, some are true, maybe some are not true, but they're killing each other over it. That is the Hot Topic. Next time we will go through and look at kind of like here we now are as Christians, followers of Jesus. How do we evaluate this covenant that Abraham received?
• 38:22
  How do we evaluate the covenant that the Jewish or the Hebrew people received at Mount Horeb through Moses? And what if anything, this is gonna be controversial because I think this is what got Charlie Kirk in trouble. What as a Christian, what is our duty obligation to the political state of Israel today? Again, I'm not gonna tell you which way to go but I'm just saying it's a hot topic, it is a very hot topic and it sets on these covenants from long ago. Gracious father, you say if anybody lacks wisdom, let him ask in that doubt.
• 39:13
  Father, I pray for wisdom for myself and to those who listen. That we will look at scripture and we will pray and that you will guide our steps to appropriate actions as we deal with things in the secular world that have their foundation on the covenants. I thank you and praise you in Jesus name. Amen.
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Bible in three encouragement helps us create and share more transformative content that strengthens communities worldwide. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting our nonprofit mission with a donation at cogworksmedia.org. Also, be sure to check out our other podcast, Biblical Reflections, for more faith insights. God bless.