clay pots, right? Something like that, yes. All right, let's say the stream is going. We're gonna be recording a series of fake debate shows, so I'm gonna have my back turned to you for most of the evening, but if you'd like to comment, I will get to those later. Actually, most of the comments come on other platforms besides this one, but if you comment on this platform, I will respond. I spend more time on alternative platforms, don't censor as much as this one does, so anyway. So pardon me turning my back. Wait a minute. I thought I had this set what I do I didn't do this, right? Hold on now you guys are really seeing the Everyone has technical difficulty. Yeah, everybody has technical difficulties. This is Except for Elijah Elijah has never never had technical difficulties getting the radio show started on this never ever What were you guys saying? We should talk about one of these days soon Flat Earth? Flat Earth, yeah. It'll be fun. We probably need to get someone who believes it, though. That would be good. They exist. I know this for sure. All right, I think we're finally square and ready to go. Sorry about that. Welcome to the Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD. I'm Troy Skinner. You can find me at HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. That's because I'm the pastor of that church. You can find Daniel Razvi at ConqueredByLove.org. That's not the name of the church that he's one of the pastors at, but that's the website they have. He's one of the pastors at the church that meets at Imran's house, and Elijah Dirksen is on. He's becoming kind of an irregular regular. He's like the Jay Leno of The Tonight Show back when Carson was still hosting. It was mostly like Carson, but then there were those rare special moments when Jay Leno would come in. I think I'm too young to get that reference. Yeah? Oh, okay. That's like two recording sessions in a row now that I've had a cultural reference. The audience. Yeah, you know, it occurs to me, as this show airs, I'm now in my 40th year in the television radio broadcast world, if you can believe it. And the Faith Debate has now been on the air for over 20 years. So you were like a baby probably back then. I don't even know how old you are, but you didn't get the Jay Leno, Johnny Carson reference. I know who Jay Leno is. At least it was that much. I am a vague reader. So the one who doesn't know who Jay Leno is, like at all, is Elijah Dirksen. A little bit. I know he has funny hair. And the big chin, right? Yeah. And the other voice you heard was that of Daniel Rasby. Elijah is a seminary student. How close are you to graduating? About halfway through. Okay. So, well, depending on the pace he's going, he might be done in five years. We don't know. Halfway through doesn't tell me much. It's probably going to be another year. At least another year. Probably two. All right. So, pray for him. Yes. All right. So, today we're talking about Harry Potter. And it's interesting, this topic was brought up by somebody who said, we were sure to talk about this, and then he decided not to be part of this week's show. So I'm gonna have to play the role of David Forsey. If you're a fan of this show, then you might know that voice. of David Forsey. But it came up as an aside in one of our other shows. I can't remember why, to be honest with you. But basically, I think Daniel actually said something about, like, Christian shouldn't do this, shouldn't do that. And of course, they shouldn't be reading Harry Potter or watching the movies, something like that. And David said, oh, I'm not so sure I agree with that. We should talk about that on the show one day. And so here we are. So I'm going to do my best. David. I can't get that deep. David Forsey impersonation. Are you also of the opinion that it's not necessarily always, always and always? Well, I'm not sure I know what David's opinion would be, so I'm not sure if we're in agreement, but based on what you said in that quick aside, I'm not sure I'm in agreement 100% with that. So we'll have some, right? Some fodder. So you're the one who brought it up initially kind of by accident. Harry Potter, Christians shouldn't watch the movies, shouldn't read the books. Is that, I mean, that's... But is there any nuance to that, or is it just a flat stay away? It's a stay away, but I have a reason why, a specific. And it's because it is a story that glorifies witchcraft. Witchcraft is presented in a good light, as in the good guys are doing it. And there's a lot of Christians in America, especially America, who have No real understanding of the demonic world and how it really works. It is real. Ghosts are real. Witches are real. Wizards are real. Demonic activity and possessions and witchcraft, all that is real stuff. The Bible talks about it extensively. It says not to do it. We're commanded not to do it. Not to commune with the dead. Not to practice witchcraft or sorcery and all that. And so I think a lot of Christians instinctively say, oh, it's just a funny story. I mean, that's not real anyway. Well, who cares? But it's not. It's extremely serious. And so I guess, I mean, the question, would you want to watch a movie where the good guys are going around murdering everybody or raping everybody or whatever? And as a Christian, you might say, well, maybe not. Maybe it's not a good idea to have the good guy be a rapist in the movie. OK, well, then why should the good guy be practicing witchcraft? because that is also one of the capital punishment sins in the Bible. I now have to rewrite the screenplay that I was working on, by the way. Thank you very much. I do think there's some nuance in it as well. I generally agree with what you're saying, but also I think that there is room for, if there's a main character who does these bad things, to realize oh you do this this bad thing and then there's consequences you grow from it right you're gonna have character arcs but but if the point of the writer of the story is to show that this is actually not a bad thing you know or maybe it's even a neutral thing and in case of harry potter from my understanding having In Full Disclosure, I haven't actually read the books. I know slight amounts of some of the story plot points, but I know enough to know that magic is presented as somewhat of a neutral idea there. There are good guys that do magic and there are bad guys that do magic in Harry Potter. It's kind of an escape from this kid's bad life. This is how he escapes from his abusive life. But there are bad guy wizards in Harry Potter, and there are good guy wizards. The idea that they're both doing magic, but there's white magic, and there's black magic, and there's this and that. And all magic, all sorcery is evil in real life. And I would say you don't want to be, as a Christian, watching or reading stories that glorify sin. It's one thing if that's a minor plot point, right? And this is maybe some point of disagreement I have with Elijah. Some of you might say, well, what about movies that have adultery in them? Maybe there's a James Bond, and he goes and he does all these spy things and stuff that's not necessarily sinful to fight for his country and all this, but then he also sleeps around in the movie. Well, is that a minor plot point that's not actually part of the story? Is it possible to skip? Is it possible to not be consuming that part of the media and still get the story? Maybe it is, and so maybe it's not necessarily the entire movie is wrong, but I think one of the main points of the movie is for the same reason I don't watch heist movies. something like Oceans 11 or whatever, for example, if the whole point of the story is theft, larceny, something that is wrong, it's sinful. Now that's different than vigilante stories where they're stealing something back that was stolen from them and they're getting justice done when the government or the police is not doing anything. That's a different type of story. point of the story is to glorify sin or to say that sin is good or okay, then I think that's not something Christians should be involved in. So you've made it clear now you were joking before we started the show about Harry Potter being some sort of follicly challenged cup and bowl maker or something like that. You've demonstrated that that is not the case. You know more about it than that, but you have not read the books, any of them, and you haven't watched any of the movies. Have you read, Elijah, any of the books? I haven't read the books. I haven't watched the movies, but I've seen other people reacting to some parts of it. I have a limited knowledge of it. Okay and so people know where I come from on my exposure to it. I haven't read any a single page of a Harry Potter book. I was way too old before it became popular. It was more of a kids series early on. I know a lot of adults like it too still. And my daughter wouldn't have been interested. She wasn't interested in that sort of thing. So our family was not a Harry Potter family. So I have no Exposure to the books. I feel like there's gonna be a lot of people who are Concerned about three people who have not read Harry Potter now, but the movies I've seen Possibly all of them. Maybe I've missed one. I don't know they were such a pop culture phenomenon I think I possibly think I've possibly seen one in the theater and the rest of them at home like I streaming or VHS back in the day or something. I don't know. It's been a while. I haven't seen anything. And to be honest, this is going to make Harry Potter fans probably mad at me because I'm not a huge fan of the movies. Not for religious reasons, necessarily. Just for the movies. They're far too long. The storyline takes way too much time. It's one thing when it's long because you need the time to unpack the story and develop the characters and stuff. There's just, I don't know, they stretch. Not all of them, but a couple of the movies anyway. Lord of the Rings only has three movies, also. Well, I feel the same way about the... I feel the same way about the director's cuts of Lord of the Rings. Far too long. It doesn't need to be that long. I was super into Lord of the Rings, so I loved watching the extended cuts, but yeah, I agree. Theatrical edition is definitely superior. So maybe we can contrast that. So for somebody who's... And that's a good segue, because somebody who's thinking, well, you just put Lord of the Rings in a positive light, and the good guys do magic there yeah so what about it yeah so so so before we get to that have you read those books or watch those i have read the books i have actually not watched the good movies but i would not be opposed to doing so necessarily i just haven't gotten to it would definitely recommend it but the uh i like the hobbit much more than i like the trilogy the lord of the rings um but in any case um Well, since you brought it up, what is the difference? I'll get to that in a second, but I want to know if you can argue against what I said before about why do you think, as a Christian, it was okay for you to watch the Harry Potter movies, or maybe you don't think so now that you've watched them. I'd like some of those hours back, to be honest with you. If it's a sin question or a wisdom question, I might give a different answer. I don't think it's a sin to read a Harry Potter book or watch a Harry Potter movie. Is it wise to read the books or let your children read the books or watch the movies? I think that that's probably case by case. You got to make a judgment call. For me, clearly it's in the category of fantasy. It's not dramatically different than a Lord of the Rings trilogy kind of a thing, or some of the, if you're familiar with Ted Decker, he's a Christian author who does a lot of fantasy writing. It's not horribly different than some of that. And so as long as you're consigning it as fantasy… But where do you draw the line of fantasy? Pornography is a fantasy world also. You watch pornography. None of that stuff happens in real life. The things that go on in pornography are not real-life scenarios. So you could just justify it by saying, well, these women aren't real. They're not actually doing this. And therefore, there's nothing wrong with watching this. So, but I would venture to say, as a Christian, you would have a different answer on pornography. Yeah, well, pornography, the main primary reason for watching that would be titillation, right? That would be like the only reason really to watch it. unless you're into the avant-garde arts and you're going to, you know, oh, the human body or whatever. But the positives of Harry Potter, this would be the reasons why somebody might be like, no, Christians, it's a classic good versus evil conflict. The Harry Potter character is, accidentally or on purpose, I don't know, but is in some sense a Christ figure, is a Messiah figure in the storyline. So you would look at it as a very allegorical. And you could make connections, like if your children did watch the movie or read the books, you could make the point like, could we know that all of this magic stuff is frowned upon? God doesn't like that. However, we can look at the hero, the bravery, the fighting for your friends, the trying your darndest to do the right thing in a world where it's not a sin to use magic. So we all agree that If someone was acting like Harry Potter, they would be in sin, correct? Doing magic or witchcraft. They would be evil and wicked and all that stuff. In real life. Yeah, and we have to clarify. That's why I was going to say, what do you mean doing what Harry Potter does? Yeah, the magic part, yes, but fighting for his friends, trying to defend righteousness, trying to overcome evil. We should definitely try to be like Harry Potter in that regard. But like Psalm 101 verse 3 says, I have set nothing wicked before my eyes. I hate the work of those who fall away. It shall not cling to me. So how would that factor in there? In my opinion, watching witchcraft portrayed in a positive light is setting something wicked before my eyes. Well, one of the topics we're intending to get to in about four shows from now, I believe, Is a biblical example that like how is that in the Bible, you know first Samuel chapter 28? necromancy and a witch definitely portrayed in a bad light though, so And that's that's something that that's I think super important to my position on it is is it being portrayed in a good light a positive light where it's glorifying this this witchcraft or is it being portrayed in a negative light so now is maybe a good time for a segue to Lord of the Rings also has people that are called wizards, that are called good guys. Gandalf calls himself a wizard, does magic, and is considered the good guy. The main difference, I would say, between a Lord of the Rings, and I would throw Narnia in there as well, both written by Christian authors. Or at least professing Christians. There's some debate about their salvation, I think. They've created worlds that have parallels to our own where they have higher powers. In Narnia it's Aslan, in Lord of the Rings I believe it's Iluvatar, which you wouldn't know unless you read the Silmarillion. But even Gandalf is very much of a Christ-like figure. But this is what you're saying about him. But Gandalf himself as a wizard within the story is given the authority by the stand-in for God. He's And if we're going to say, well, that that use of supernatural power is evil, then we'd also have to say, like, Moses party of the Red Sea is also evil because he's been given this authority by a higher power or by God to do this supernatural act or the biblical Elijah or anyone who does supernatural acts. They've been empowered by God to do them. And I think that's good. It's clear Lord of the Rings is empowered by God to do these things. Maybe not the movies, but certainly in the books. And Narnia, of course, Narnia is even more explicit with its allegory. Aslan is Jesus. There's deeper magic from beyond the from the dawn of time. It's God's authority, God's power to resurrect Aslan. Yeah, I will say this, you know, it would be good probably to have David Forsey here who brought up who brought up, well, Daniel brought up the topic, but David was the one who was like, hey, we should talk about that, because I'm not sure I agree with you. He would probably be stronger in advocating for it, because I'm guessing that he reacted the way he did, because he has a bunch of kids in his house, and they've probably all read Harry Potter. That's my guess. I don't know. But the way he reacted makes me feel like they probably have. And maybe they've watched all the movies. They're a Harry Potter family, and they're all about it. And that wasn't us. But I will say that if I did have a daughter who was, you know, when she was 10 or whenever Harry Potter was becoming popular, and she wanted to read the Harry Potter books, I probably would have read them or allowed her to read them. And I would have been reading them with her. It would have been a shared reading experience. I think it's important for any books to be proofreading them all with your kids. And this I would say, regardless of what you think about what we're saying about Harry Potter or The Rings or anything, something you as parents listening to this show can take to heart is, do not buy a book or get a movie for your kids and let them read it or watch it without you first knowing exactly what's in it. I know that's time consuming, but do not let them consume any media at all, book or TV or movie, without either you watching it at the same time to immediately stop any bad things that you see, or watching it ahead of time, front to back, beginning to end, to be 100% sure what's going on there. It is not worth it. It's better not to have it consumed at all. they will not die if they don't see the newest hot movie or read the great new or young adult book that came out. In fairness, and I'm not saying that this is an excuse, but in fairness, taking a hard line stance on it or say something that's very close to a hard line stance is very difficult. Oh, for sure. Because it's everywhere. You can't watch old sitcoms of Bewitched You can't watch Elmo saved Christmas You can't watch Fantasia and this is like I haven't read Harry Potter I haven't watched the movies, but I have watched those old Disney movies and I really like a lot of them I think they're great, but I'm not going to give them to my daughter to watch. Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast. I mean, right down the line, right? All these Disney movies. But it's not just Disney. I'm trying to think of things, but they happen almost accidentally. Like you're watching a show and like one episode. For example, okay, do you know the Waltons? Okay, Elijah knows the Waltons. Well, the Waltons are a, they're supposedly like this wholesome, all American, you know, comfort food drama program that aired back in the, you know, 1970s. And it kind of started that way. The first couple of seasons were particularly wholesome. It's a church going family. They prayed before meals. A lot of things that Christians would applaud. We used to watch the first two seasons all the time. I guess we didn't get to the bad parts. However, They have, during their run, that show was on the air for like 10 years or something. And there were two or three years where they did Halloween episodes. And one of them features what we would call a Ouija board. I think it's called a spirit board on the TV show. They have ghost apparitions in one episode. And it's not a, they think it might be a ghost. You're left with the impression as a viewer at the end that it was actually a ghost because things are left unexplained. you know, prank ghosts or people pretending that they're ghosts or thinking that they're ghosts, and then they turn out, oh, it's not really, it's not really. So my point is, you're watching The Waltons, thinking, oh, this is safe. And we've watched The Waltons all the time. We've watched 30 Waltons episodes. It's always safe and good, wholesome stuff. And then, boom, the Halloween episode comes on. And you're like, whoa, didn't see that coming. And that will be one where, see, my standard for my kids is they don't watch anything, even a single episode of something that I haven't watched in a while. So well, it's easy. Well, I don't know if it's come up on the show in the past. Your father said there's no TV in the house. No. So that's a little easier. You guys have said, you know, TV is dangerous. It's a portal to evil. We're not going to have one. I do have subscriptions to streaming services. I do have online access to movies and TV shows and things like that. And I do watch some. And I have very, very limited access to what my kids would see. But if and when they ever see anything, it's not going to be something that I haven't already seen. So that won't happen, that we've watched a whole bunch of episodes of something and think it's pretty good, and then we turn on the next one, oh, I didn't know about this. It doesn't happen, because I've already proofread it. I like that it's really countercultural. That's a very cool thing. But as I was saying, it's really hard to be countercultural, because sometimes you're surprised. So where would your line be if you have a line with consuming media? Where would you say, I'm not going to watch that? We know pornography is a line you just mentioned. Do you agree with me? And I'm not saying it to be funny. There are people who that's not a line for. So you have a line there. And along those lines, by the way, a lot of people, a lot of people that profess to be Christians were big fans 10 years ago when it was popular, or five, whatever years ago when it was popular, of Game of Thrones. I've never seen Game of Thrones because I think it was an HBO show and I didn't have HBO. So I've never seen. I think I've seen an advertisement for it or something. I haven't either, but my understanding is that there is quite a bit of nudity. Oh, that's my understanding. It's like, it's basically, it's not even... If you turn on the filter service, it would be opening credits, ending credits. It's loaded with like crazy violence and lots of frontal nudity. Well, okay, I don't need to see that so I had no interest in seeing even though it was popular Why is it Troy that scene final nudity is wrong for you as a believer but watching witchcraft is not wrong It's kind of like the discussion I had with your father and your mother one time about drugs and sugar and Your parents were taking out of it still hold this position, they probably do, what they did back then, that sugar is a drug. I'm like, I don't know if sugar is a drug. But anyway, it's similar to that. So the nudity, the sensuality, even if it's not nudity, if it's highly sensual, that has an effect almost at a subconscious level. It seeps in in a way that other sins don't? Well, the fantasy entertainment stuff is like, you can check a box, this is clearly fantasy. He's not really waving that wand and sending people into the abyss. Let's talk about Harry Potter, though, because that kind of was a worldwide phenomenon where everyone got this interest in the occult and casting spells and all that, because it was so popular. It kind of pushed people in that direction, and it just kind of exploded around the time. The cult is a lot more open now than it was before the Harry Potter phenomenon started. People that do practice the cult do it much more openly now. So you think it's because of Harry Potter? That's one of the contributing factors. I think it made people think that witchcraft is actually a fun and good thing to do, and it was something that was openly talked about. That's why I would say there's danger in glorifying sin, is that it makes sin fun and popular. And like, think about what public schools do. They glorify being in a homosexual relationship or being trans. And guess what? We have a lot more homosexual relationships and teens saying, well, I'm trans now. Now, since I haven't read the books, and the movies always short circuit these things you can't know, It's possible that some God presence, higher power kind of presence, is responsible for the magic powers that Harry has in Harry Potter. If that were the case, would it fall in the same category as Lord of the Rings? It would. To my knowledge, that's not what Harry Potter is. But yeah, I guess. We're kind of arguing for ignorance. Yeah. Welcome to my world. From my perspective, I don't know that you can differentiate that easily between different types of sins. Certainly, different sins have different consequences. But sin is sin. And I don't think it's right to be glorifying sin in any way. So just as you should not consume content that is putting adultery in a good light, In pornography would be one example of that But you'd mentioned could be sensual content that doesn't have nudity in it Would also be that same that's the same reason I think Watching you're looking at a heist movie is is not not a good thing because Christians should not be involved in larceny and robberies And just like rape and just like murder and and anything else so and the thing is It's interesting to me because almost any of those other sins, I can get somebody, a Christian, to say, yeah, you know what, that makes sense, that makes sense. But as soon as I say witchcraft, oh no, that's fine, that's just a fantasy world. I hear that time and time again from people. And for whatever reason, it's only the witchcraft, it's only the occult that's okay. Everything else, so yeah, you know. And they may not follow the rules, right? They may say, well, yeah, I don't want to glorify adultery. But it's, I mean, it's not that much, it's just a tiny bit of the movie. I think that overstates the case a little bit, because people, you know, instead people do what, the heist movies are very popular. They are. A lot of foul-mouthed drunks in movies end up being the hero. Like there's, you know, there's lots of, So would you watch something worse? I mean, Seinfeld, for crying out loud, that's nothing but a show filled with sinners. I mean, seriously, every single, they're so narcissistic. The whole show is about sin on display and people watched that and made excuses for it. Well, I think you can make an argument that they're acting In Sin and the E, the consequences of those sins has consequences. It's a sitcom. They had no consequences on Seinfeld. I haven't watched much Seinfeld. George Costanza murders his wife and gets away with it. Come on. I don't know, in that one episode, they didn't get any soup, so that was a contest. No soup for you. No more soup for you. We have to wrap this up. We've got like 30 seconds. Elijah Dirksen, Daniel Rasby, I'm Troy Skinner. Find us online at WFMD.com and HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. That's kind of the one-stop shop for everything, to connect with me, get my contact information, everything. householdoffaithinchrist.com. Wfmd.com is fine too. I'm not gonna tell you not to go there for sure, okay? We'll be back with another faith debate show next week to talk about, I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, Casting Lots. That's next week. 167 and a half hours from right about now. Until then, God bless. We should probably circle back on one of the next couple of recordings to let David Forsey get some more input into the Harry Potter thing. He had his chance. I'm not sure if he would say anything a whole lot different, but he might have, I think he would highlight the, you know, that it's good versus evil. It's clearly fantasy, and my kids understand that, you know, we're not glorifying the magic, we're just using our imaginations. He would probably say things like that. Again, I didn't have to make that hard call. My daughter had zero interest in Harry Potter, zero. It wasn't like, hey, you want to read Harry Potter? She just never came to me with, hey, everybody's reading Harry Potter. Can I read it? It never, ever came up. So I had the... So like with a show with like, let's say a serial killer goes around killing people. Would that be OK if he was like a good... And he's a good hero? He's a good dad, takes care of his kids, but he's also a serial killer. What would your opinion of that be? You know, a lot of the vampire movies are like that, right? So like Twilight, for example. The main characters, the good guys, they also do heroic things and they also drink Guadalquivir. I think it was also another HBO show, Game of Thrones was huge for them, but so was The Sopranos. And it's mob guys, and they're the heroes. Godfather, one, two, and three. So there are shows like that where you do have someone who, that's their character, is doing something bad, like I guess breaking bad. From my understanding, it's a drug cartel guy, a drug empire. But my understanding is that causes him to wreck his life. Yeah, basically. Yellowstone. You guys familiar with Yellowstone? That's like been the rage the last five years. I've heard of it. And Kevin Costner's in that stuff and that's loaded with violence and murder and they're the heroes. Violence and murder aren't necessarily bad things. Murder is the bad thing always. Well, murder yes. Violence and killing though is not necessarily it. Correct. You're really great down the curve. There's a lot of justification sometimes for certain actions and a lot of it's cultural, a lot of it's not, you know, maybe illegal, but still. But even if someone did murder someone and then there's consequences for that, I think that's fine. I don't think there's any consequences for performing magic. I mean, the Bible has witchcraft in it. The Bible has murder in it. Everything you can think of in it. There's consequences in Harry Potter it seems to me though. For using magic. All the magic is used against him. But not for him using magic. There's no consequence that happens where it's shown that it was a bad idea for him to use that magic. Unless, I don't know much about it, but unless there's some side plot where he turns dark for a bit and gets drunk with power and then that becomes a bad thing. But generally, whenever he's casting spells, if it's portrayed in a good light, I don't think that's a good thing. So you knew the Waldens, but you didn't know Johnny Carson or Jay Leno. I knew them, I just didn't know the drama of everything associated with them. cultural references are less and less relevant. I try to pull from abroad, I'll reference things even from the 50s on occasion, the 60s, the 70s, I try to have a broader, a broad range. I'm a little bit thin the last 15 years, I gotta tell you. The cultural wave blew past me and if it's been popular within the last 15 years, I probably don't know a whole lot about it. I don't know about Game of Thrones. Yeah, but that might be 15 years ago. I don't know. When was that on? That was pretty old though. The finale. It's at least five, 10 years ago, right? It's got to be. Well, it's had eight seasons. Eight seasons. Season eight was in 2011. Because everyone says season eight is so bad. 2019 was the last season. Oh, so it was from like the 2010s. 2011 to the 2019. So it was probably at the peak of its popularity like 10 years ago. Yeah, that's okay. I knew a little something about that. See, I'm still hip. He was saying I'm not hip. But yeah, I did. Out of curiosity, have you heard of the filtering service, Dead Angel? Yeah. Okay. So it's really cool because you can really filter out a lot of the stuff you don't want. So out of curiosity, I put on Game of Thrones into the filter. Every episode is 12 minutes long. It was about that bad. It shows the bar of what's cut out before you watch it. And it's like, it's all black. And the nice thing about that is you can choose, like, well, I don't want any nudity, but I'm OK with violence. And I don't want the F word, but I'm OK with these other words. And it'll only mute those sections of the movie. It'll only skip those things. And so you can get a very clean experience from a lot of R-rated movies that can actually be kid-friendly with that, because you can cut out Everything bad. There was some version of that like 15 years ago That the tech wasn't quite there. It was very clunky and it was horrible Very good, but they're only limited because the Disney and Warner Brothers sued them for and so they had to settle So they can't do any Disney or Warner Brothers own content, which is like half of all movies But anything else they can do It's really annoying, and it's completely wrong. Why can't you just skip? You can fast forward through something. This is basically pre-programming fast forward. What's wrong with that? You're still giving credit to whoever made the movie, and more people are watching the content, so it should be good for them. For example, there's one movie that, in my opinion, it's one of the all-time great movies, but I can't ever watch it because it's got one scene in it that's just... horribly inappropriate. What movie? Jerry Maguire. Okay. You ever seen that movie? That's the one where Tom Cruise dances in underwear, right? No, that's, oh my God, that's Risky Business. That's the 1980s. Oh my goodness. That's like almost 20 years before Jerry Maguire, I think. At least 15. Jerry Maguire, it's about friendship and loyalty and defending what's right and standing up for good principles and taking a chance, willing to risk everything to do what you think is the right thing to do. It's a great lesson, great story. It's well acted, it's funny. It's got one scene. It's like two minutes long, maybe. It's just, it's basically a sex scene. And it's not like, there's nothing left to the imagination. It's like, whoa. And you don't even know it's coming. My first time I saw the movie, I had no idea that was in there. What am I looking at? And the fact that it wasn't just a fleeting glimpse, it goes on for like a minute or two. It's like, whoa, stop, stop, stop. So Jerry McGuire is on VinAgel. And you can put the filters in there and it'll tell you exactly what you're skipping too. So even like the nudity section, it'll say, well, male shirtless, female shirtless. And you can skip certain things and others. I wonder what a faith debate stream would look like. What would they edit out of the faith? I don't know. You have a choice. And that's a nice thing. Daniel Rasmussen. I'd like to see. Elijah Dirksen. There's the F word. Faith. Faith. There we go. Yes. But it's like getting another subscription. It's like $10 or $15 a month. But they'll link to all of your other ones. So you put in your password for Netflix in there. And it'll log on to Netflix within the system and then just fast forward while you're watching Netflix or whatever. So, it's definitely, definitely worth it. Honestly, we could probably edit out the magic of Harry Potter. Maybe we'll do a... Yeah, maybe we'll just do a... The thing is, that's not one of the filters. They don't have filters for magic. I'm gonna give that a shout out at the beginning of the show. That's worth people hearing if they learned last week's show. Welcome to the Faith Debate on NewsRadio 930 WFMD. I'm Troy Skinner, joined this week by Elijah Dirksen. He's a seminary student. He lives in Iowa, but goes to school in Florida, and here he is on a show in Maryland. Don't ask. I'm a very strange guy. Oh, say that again, because I had your mic off. Very strange guy over here. Daniel Razvi is here as well. He's one of the pastors at the Church that Meets at Imran's house. You can find him online at conqueredbylove.org. And the best way to connect with the show, with me and most of the guys here, is all my contact information and everything is at my church's website. That's Household of Faith in Christ. I know it's a mouthful, but it's kind of easy to remember, right? Household of Faith in what? Inchrist.com. And there you can connect to all the stuff that has to do with the faith debate, also has to do with the church. There's great resources on there that have been vetted by by me and others that are trusted resources. Now, just because they're trusted doesn't mean I agree with every single jot and tittle of what somebody says. But on the whole, the ministries that we connect to on the website are solid. We might disagree on eschatology. We might disagree on some political matters that are lesser importance, things like that. might disagree on baptism questions, but I think you can be in good fellowship with people that have a different view on some of those kinds of questions. So that's not a knockout blow. But if you're woke, if you preach a false gospel, if you're insanely leftist and liberal, like you don't believe the Bible is the word of God, stuff like that, I'm not going to recommend you on our website. So anyway, you were mentioning between shows. Last week we were talking about Harry Potter. And this would have been a nice thing to mention last week. So a lot of people will listen to the shows on podcasts back to back, maybe. Yeah, welcome to five minutes ago as you were listening to the podcast you heard us talking about harry potter We should have mentioned then and I and I said at the time just for a little bit of context as a parent You should always be previewing everything your kids watch whether it's harry potter or anything else And you should be very careful what you let them consume Not just because everybody else is doing it or everybody else can see it. It's okay They will not die if they don't see the latest and greatest movie with all the bells and whistles So one thing that you can use as a parent, there's a service called VidAngel. V-I-D, like video, VidAngel. And they have an app and they have a website. Basically, it's a subscription. You pay 10 or 15 bucks a month or whatever they charge you, kind of like Netflix. Outrageous! It sounds like we're sponsored. We're not sponsored by VidAngel. It's not. I'm not sponsored by them. But it's a really, really great service. Because what happens is they'll connect to your Netflix or your Amazon Prime or your HBO or whatever it is. And you can watch anything that's been, that's on there, that they've gone through and they've done filters. It's a filtering service. But it's not just their pre-programmed filters. You get to choose the filters. So it'll tell you, in XYZ movie, you know, there's three sex scenes, and there's eight uses of the F word, and there's this violent scene and that violent scene, and it'll describe, like, it'll have a sentence about, you know, each of these things that you could skip. And you can check, check, check the box to skip certain parts of the movie, whether it's sound, like audio for language, or whether it's video for violence or nudity or something like that. So if it's sound, like the video's still there, but they mute it. Exactly. Unless it's, sometimes, they go so far as to, like, if there's profanity written out in a book, like, they'll skip that section of the, like, mostly fast forward. And how precise are these edits? Extremely precise, like, to the millisecond. before and after. So you don't miss any other part of the movie. And you can choose what level of filters. So you can say, well, I'm OK with violence, but I don't want to hear profanity. Or I'm OK with profanity, but I don't want to see nudity or whatever. And you can choose some of those filters. It's very, very useful. I highly recommend it. Or even levels of violence, like some mild violence might be OK, but then like gore and that kind of stuff could be. I wonder what it would do with Tom and Jerry cartoons. Now, full disclosure, there was a big lawsuit against them by Disney and by Warner Brothers, who were mad that they were filtering their content. And so due to the settlement, there is no content owned by Disney or Warner Brothers that can be filtered on this platform. Oh, I was going to say, what a great way for these companies to reach an audience and have wholesome content for families. I mean, certainly every company would want to do this. I would think so. Except for Warner Brothers and Disney, which is half the movies out there. Yeah, but the other half, there's actually quite a few things on there, so I highly recommend look at that, especially if you have kids that might be watching things. Filter it through VidAngel, and you can preset what's going to be seen, so you don't have to get up and fast-forward. I mean, how many times have you planned to fast-forward something, and then missed it, and then, oh, now my kid saw whatever? Now, can you, like, filter it for heresy? Because, like, I, you know, if I were to watch The Chosen, I could watch a whole episode in about three minutes. Unfortunately, it might not be that advanced, but you can take out, like, the Lord's name in vain. If I was going to watch The Shack, it would just jump to the end. You'd see the opening and closing credits, that'd be it. I did, as a test, I loaded up Game of Thrones in there, one of the episodes, and I checked off all the filters, and it was really like, instead of 45 minutes, it was like five minutes or something. But anyway, I, you know, it's funny, I just remember... So V.I.D. Angel, V.I.D. Angel, and they're not a sponsor of us, but I highly, highly recommend them. So if you got an extra, sounds like 150 bucks a year to spend, you can have some security that your kids aren't going to be watching stuff that you're doing. What about you? You might want to stop yourself from watching certain stuff. Yeah, sure, yeah. I remember way back when, like it's probably back in the 1990s, Eddie Murphy was still kind of popular as a stand-up comedian back then. and I was involved in sports radio, and I wanted to pull some bits that, for comedic reasons, in the show that were from Eddie Murphy's stand-up. Well, if you've ever seen or heard Eddie Murphy's stand-up, I mean, there's lots of foul language. And so I had to edit out the foul language and make use of And the idea hit me, I said, maybe I'll just go through an entire album and I'll edit all the foul stuff out. It's like a 45 minute album. And it ended up with like a, you know, 32 minute album or 35 or whatever it was. And I got to say, probably 85% of the time, it was just as funny, maybe even funnier because it wasn't so distracting. In some cases, like you had to just take the whole joke out because the punchline was the foul word. And so without the punchline, there's no joke. But anyway, so I did that. I still own on cassette somewhere, I'm sure, Eddie Murphy, two of his stand-up albums, Curse Free. And then the way that you did editing back then is you actually physically cut the tape with a razor blade and taped the oxidized tape back together. And so I took all the stuff I cut out and I taped that together. And it was like seven minutes of nothing but cursing. With different inflections and stuff, you know. And I got to say, right here, we're all laughing at it. It's morbidly funny, you know. Anyway, other things that are morbidly funny are casting lots. Okay, that's not a very good segue. So what is casting lots? So it's going to Sodom and Gomorrah, grabbing a guy named Lot by the scruff of the neck, and casting him out of the city. Something like that. That's how my children's Bible tells it anyway. Anyway, so yeah, that's one of the questions, well, what are casting lots? The scheduled topic for today, what are we to make of casting lots in the Bible? So part of that is, what are they? And then once we've figured all that out, should we still do it? Should we still cast lots? So who wants to tackle what casting lots is? Unless I was right. Was I right? It's about grabbing a guy by the scruff of the neck? I think it has to do with some kind of game of chance in order to make a decision, right? So like drawing straws or whatever, you know, you get correct. From my understanding, it was a casting lot. So you take some straws or I guess talisman, I'm not sure, but you It's kind of like throwing the dice. It's basically like a dice. And when one of them lands a certain way, then that points you to one decision, and when a different one lands a different way, that's a different decision. It's a determination governed by chance. And by the way, you can't talk about throwing dice without saying, roll the dice, move your mice, nobody gets hurt. Anyway, he hasn't watched VeggieTales. You know what? You were way ahead of your time because now I'm not sure we can trust any of this. To be honest, VeggieTales is a bet because the pirates were the good guys and they were singing fun, catchy songs. No, I'm serious. That was an actual serious conversation we had as a family saying, you know what? We can't watch VeggieTales because the pirates are singing catchy, fun songs and we're going to be glorifying piracy. The issue I had with VeggieTales was that it wasn't biblical. It wasn't Christian. It was moralism. So it's it's an insidious kind of a thing and it's not the gospel It's it's it's works based. And yeah, you want your kids be moral. And so it's certainly better than 98% of what's out there, but it wasn't it wasn't presenting. There's very little pointing actually to the gospel there was a lot of and that helps explain why Phil Vischer went off the deep end and became ultra woke down the because he wasn't a solid gospel guy from the beginning. Well, it's like the Donut Man. The Donut Man ended up becoming Catholic. We talked about this on the show a few weeks ago, I think. And that was a similar type of thing. It was a whole bunch of kids' Sunday school type songs, and they weren't really that deep theologically. But anyway. So, um, casting lots, it's kind of like throwing, you know, flipping a coin, you know, calling heads or tails and saying, basically, if it's this way, then I'm going to go this direction. If it's this way, I'm going to make this decision. And in biblical terms, there's a lot of. examples of people casting lots and then praying to God to say, God, please make it end up a certain way to show me a decision. So it's like, instead of trusting that God's going to actually audibly speak to you what you should do, you're telling God, I'm going to abide by whatever this lot says, so make it happen the way it should. Right. I'm going to throw these dice. If I get snake eyes, I know I'm supposed to buy the house. And if I don't get snake eyes, I'm supposed to Not by the house, and so it has been used in the Bible a number of times in a positive light. I would say there's Other times and I would say well, maybe this wasn't actually committing God He actually commanded to give lots I think a couple times in any place that God actually says the two that come to mind are Joshua dividing the promised land in Exodus or excuse me Joshua 18 I think and There God doesn't directly command it, but it seems like God approves of it and And the other instance is the choosing of Matthias as the twelfth disciple. That one's one that I've heard a number of sermons about where maybe that was a really bad idea with the twelfth apostle because it doesn't... You never really hear from him again, but I don't think there's anything in the passage that reveals that it was a bad decision. It feels like, to me, in the idea of Matthias, they got two people. They're like, well, God picked between these two. Not God show us who it is among all the people. Well, that's why many people say well God really actually he chose Paul and Paul is the twelfth apostle now is a whole bunch of I don't know as you can make about that Anyway, so in my understanding it is it's decent to choose to cast lots to decide something when Making a decision would prejudice a particular group, like the 12 tribes with Joshua dividing up the land. If Joshua were to show favoritism to one tribe over the other and say, hey, you guys get to pick first. then it would create infighting, all that, the strife among the tribes. So I think that would be an example of one area where it would be okay to cast lots. What's the difference between that and just asking God to show you and then waiting for him to respond in some way? Well, that's what they were doing, in my opinion. So is that how you should make decisions as a believer today? So should you say, well, God, should I take this job or not? So that they call me in the next 10 minutes, then I should take the job. If they call me in 20 minutes, I should not take the job. Okay, God, you do it now. And then that's kind of the tricky thing. Every example in the Bible was done before we had the full revelation. We didn't have everything in the bible except from matthias oh you're talking about we know that we didn't have the new testament we didn't have the entire canon when matthias was chosen but they did have the the holy spirit by that time pentecost had already happened they did but They were still receiving revelation organically through the Holy Spirit working directly in them, speaking directly to them, things like that. So now you're sounding like a cessationist. You're kind of implying that now we no longer receive revelation that way? No. That God does not speak to people or give them audible commands? I'm saying that we have a complete Bible. So if we're looking for advice on, hey, should I take a job? I'm going to look to the Bible first before I listen. God gives me a direct way. Assuming you're not in an immoral career, you're not joining a strip club or something or whatever, then if you're choosing as a lawyer whether to work for one law firm or another law firm, and they both seem to be reasonable law firms, there's nothing in Scripture you're going to find that's going to speak specifically to that. Not specifically to that, but I can make applications from Scripture to every area of my life. You can, and you should always do that, but there's going to be plenty of decisions you make that it's not going to be easily clear from scripture. You're going to have to have the Holy Spirit's leading. And the question is, should you as a believer, should you wait for that leading by the Holy Spirit? Or is it ever appropriate to just make a random choice? My thinking is that the casting of lots was used when it was done by a person in a position of authority, like Peter or Joshua. And they were doing it so as to avoid favoritism or any appearance of favoritism within it. They're just leaving it completely up to the providence of God. So they're not saying, well, I choose Matthias over them, or I choose Neptali over the rest of the tribes to get the best pick. All right, so Troy, your turn. You haven't said anything yet. Yeah, so... I didn't do like any special study for the topics we're tackling, you know, last week's show, this week's show. So I'm doing this off the cuff. And so if I'm saying something that's really horribly wrong, you know, forgive me in advance, but to the best of my memory, I don't think there's an instance in Scripture where any of God's people are commanded or instructed to cast lots. I think it's always in the context of a narrative passage where it's describing what happened. So the narrative is tell or somebody's saying what they're going to do like joshua says I'm going to cast lots and figure out how to divvy up the land But it's not god told me to cast the lots. It's just he just makes a declarative statement I'm going to cast a lot and the in the new testament you talked about matthias in the selection here That's in the book of acts, which is a a narrative. It's a descriptive Book of the bible. It's not a prescriptive look at the Bible, meaning it's not law, it's not legal code, it's not, these are instructions that you must obey. So they're just, part of me wonders, is it possible? And this is me off the cuff, so you guys can walk me off a ledge if I'm an idiot. Is it possible that this is an example where the Bible doesn't come out and say this is wrong, but maybe there's an inference that that wasn't the best way to go, kind of like there's no explicit David had a billion wives and Sam and you know, every gang had a billion wives and it's not Specific and this was condemned by God like that doesn't follow and yet if you read the full Narrative it's clear that yeah, they really shouldn't have been doing that because you can look at the consequences all of these So what was the consequence? I would only say that in that particular case that may not be a great example of it because there is some fashion in the law that says It's a specific command in the Torah that says kings may not have multiple wives. So what would be the specific consequences you're talking about? There are certainly other types of activity. Look at the consequences with the lineage of the kings. You've got half-brothers turning on half-brothers. You've got sons trying to kill their father. I agree completely with the wives thing, the casting lots of Joshua. What were the consequences of him casting lots to divide the land? Yeah, I haven't thought it all the way through, but before I really tried to connect the dots on the adulterous relationships these kings had with all their wives, I wasn't noting all of the consequences. And then when I went looking for it, it's a command. You can't do this. And yet they're doing it. And the silence in the Bible almost seems to be sanctioning it. So then I studied it deeper. It's like, wait, he's not sanctioning it. If you know what you're looking for, you can see there's a consequence right down the line. Every single example of polygamy in the Bible has negative consequences, specifically because of the polygamy. If I were to take the time and do a deep dive study on lots, would we see that maybe the allocation of the land wasn't without its problems? Matthias is like, never heard from again. Maybe there's some message in that for us. You never hear of Bartholomew again either. You know, I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but it's not, they're never commanded to do it. But yeah, Joshua also, I'm just, Thuram and Thumam too, they talked about a bunch, what is that? But there is a command to do that. I'm reading the passage of Joshua 18. It's, and the one thing I would say is that this is, Joshua after he was received a vision from God to go and do this after he's been rebuked for not dividing up the land and he's saying we're going to cast lots before the Lord. So it's not them doing it without God's approval. It's not them doing it without God. They're doing it before God. They're doing it with God. I guess, to your point, God may not have directly sanctioned it or may not have directly approved it, but it seemed like they were doing it in conjunction with God or at least attempting to. Yeah, so that's me trying to see, because I felt like there was some pushback from Daniel, possibly like, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. And I was like, okay, that would be my thinking. I would want to do a study and a deep dive and try to see if I can make connections to see if there's some strong validity rather than just perhaps some surface validity of what Daniel's saying. But on the other side, like lots, these are good guys. Joshua's a hero. The 11 remaining disciples who become apostles, they're good guys and they're doing this. So, okay, what's the good thing? You know what? We still do cast lots. We just don't call it that anymore. We flip coins. We draw straws. We go eeny, meeny, miny, moe, right? We do, and we're not putting up a chance per se, but we're allowing for a random drawing, because to the best of our wisdom, I can't decide if I'm the host of this show, and I need to ask one of you two a question, and you're both equally capable of answering the question, and I don't know who to go to, and in my mind, I'm going to make a judgment call, but if I'm just frozen, because I feel like this is too important a question to just pick the wrong guy. And I don't wanna offend, so I'm gonna say, look, I don't want you, Daniel, to be offended, I don't want you, Elijah, to be offended, so if it's okay with you, I'm gonna flip a coin. Heads, I'm asking Elijah the question, and everybody feels good about it. So maybe that's all it is. That would be my thinking of, that was the exact situation in both of those situations we talked about before. You don't wanna show favoritism from a position of leadership, so you cast lots and say, it's up to God. So should we use different, like, instead of, let's flip a coin, let's cast lots, who's got a quarter? Should we use a little English? Maybe that would solve it. That's kind of more of a wrinkle to this. I think an example where it is somewhat negative is Gideon. He's questioning God. I don't want to do this. But if you really want me to do it, I'm going to set this fleece before you. But God actually responds to it. Yeah. And it's not called casting lots. But it is some type of random test. Maybe not even random. The first thing was, it was weird. Yeah, it is different and it is weird. That might be a good topic all by itself for a show. But it's different in this regard because the casting lots like heads are cut. It's going to be heads, it's going to be tails. Everybody knows it was on the up and up. The fleece wasn't exactly random. Yeah, that's not random. I was asking for a specific sign. It's a little different. Even Hezekiah said, well, give me a sign. And then Isaiah said, okay, you don't have a sign. It will be this. But Gideon is saying, well, give me this sign. If you really want me to do this, then show this. If you really want. But then he gets the sign. He says, show me again. How big of a God are you really? Can you do it twice? I think that's a little different with Gideon. Probably. I think my hesitation with casting lots is trying to put God in a box. That God can only pick one of these two or three or ten things that you have on the list. It's kind of like something I, you know, my My mom tells this story about how as she got closer in her walk with God, it's very different. So she used to get up, long time ago, she would get up in the morning and she would say, God, please help me get these things done that are on my list today. And that was one stage in her walk with God. And then later, she got more mature and she said, well, God, please help me get the things that are on my list that are of your will, please help me get those done today. She got more in her return to walk with God. She used to get up and say, you know, God, this is my list, but if you want me to do any of them, some of them, none of them, just get done what your will is. Even if it's none of this stuff, you show me. And so that becomes more maturity, recognizing sometimes what God has for you isn't even on your list at all, right? So in this case of casting lots, If we're doing that, then we're telling God, we're only going to choose one of these things, not some other thing that you might have for us. That's my only hesitation. That may factor into our biblical examples here, because it clearly was God's purpose to divvy out the land between the tribes. It clearly was God's purpose to have a twelfth apostle, according to Peter. Peter cited scripture and said it should be twelve. I guess the question is though, with the difference with the twelve tribes, God wanted all twelve of these tribes to have, and these are specific ones, and they have a specific general geography. So here, with the twelfth apostle, it wasn't commanded which of these people should be. They picked two that they thought would be good. My argument is, How do we know that God actually wanted one of those two people? Because if they cast lots, the lot wasn't going to fall on some other person. It's going to be one of these two people. One thing is different though. Those are the two people who are qualified. Are those the only two people that were qualified? Well, in their determination, it seems. But here's something that's different about the casting lots from the trusting God to help you make your decision. Again, I'm doing this off the cuff. But I think all the situations where lots are cast, it's like group decisions. Right? It's the... They don't agree necessarily. The disciples weren't 100% sure and so they weren't in agreement. They decided among them, it's one of these two... There's two equally qualified people, who are we going to pick? And the people were maybe unsure of who was supposed to get what part of the land and they were in disagreement and he's like, let's cast lots. There's a story about where it's, they're not God's people, but the sailors with Jonah, they cast lots. to figure out what to do in that situation. They were probably in disagreement, like, okay, let's see who's going to win. But God still revealed the right answer. I found a place where casting lots was commanded for the scapegoat. You have two goats, you cast lots, one goes to the Lord, one's for the scapegoat. And so then you sacrifice one and you send one away. All right, then. So God did command casting lots. Who says he don't learn something on the faith debate show? Even the people on the show are learning things on the faith of a show on the fly. Okay, so it's clearly not a sin if it's commanded. So it's an allowed thing. For certain decisions anyway. Right. So that makes it different than polygamy. But that's kind of like saying, well, like we said a month or two ago, oh, clearly war isn't always wrong because God did command it sometime. but you could easily make the argument that that might be the only time that war was ever justified. There could be a situation, to your point, where you're not gonna exercise wisdom, you're not gonna do the right thing, you're gonna leave it up to quote-unquote chance. By the way, I'm losing time on the clock. Elijah Dirksen, Daniel Rasmey, I'm Troy Skinner, this is Faith Debate. We'll continue next week, 167 and a half hours, right now. Till then, God bless. We had a really extended Good Angel promo on that one. We did. It really sounded like, this video is sponsored by Good Angel. That's what I was thinking the whole time. Are you tired of watching all this violence and gore and beauty and profanity in your movies? We should just cut that just in case we ever get sponsored by Good Angel. Maybe we can send them and say, hey, would you mind paying us? They're bankrupt. They filed for bankruptcy before the lawsuit. because now they're going to get a whole bunch of new subscribers. They're out of the law, so now they're restructured, I think. But they definitely did have a lot of financial troubles. And it was so evil. Basically, what Disney was saying and Warner Brothers was saying, we want people to watch our bad content, our evil content. We want to force them to do that. Incidentally, I don't know where you guys and the people in this room are on the continuation versus cessation question, but when you say, well, that makes you sound like a cessationist. And you're like immediate. I'm a mild continuationist. Okay, because you're like immediate, like, no, no, no. And I'm a moderate continuationist. Neither of us are cessationists. I think Charismatics and Pentecostals completely misunderstand most of the sign gifts, but I can't say, I can't look at a passage and say, well, obviously God doesn't talk to people anymore. or obviously God doesn't allow people to speak in a different language so other people can understand them anymore. In fact, I've met people, like a missionary pastor, that he had the gift of tongues. What that means is he goes around and preaches in different countries and they understand him. I don't think it's gibberish, which is why I would only be a mild continuationist. I wouldn't be like a charismatic. But there is an interesting passage, which we could talk about at some point, but there's an interesting passage where Paul talks about when you're speaking in the Spirit. I know. It throws a monkey wrench into my entire theory. But he does say that if that happens, it's got to be private, right? So don't actually talk about it. You can still be consistent saying in public church setting you can't just speaking gibberish. It's for the benefit of the speaker. Yeah. But those are two different passages. They are two different passages. The one passage you can make the argument that he's merely speaking hypothetical. Potentially. Even if I were to. But why do you spend an entire chapter speaking on something that doesn't happen? Well, I think he's using a hyperbole in that section. That's why I think it's hot. I'm not sure what you think about that, but I think there's a string of hyperbolic statements. I think I'm willing for it's been a little while since I spent time in that part of the Bible. Help me understand it because it doesn't seem to fit with. tongues in the rest of the Bible, specifically to evangelize to people. I'm open to the gifts continuing because there's nothing in the Bible that overtly, explicitly says they end. No, it says tongues shall cease. Don't you know? That verse says tongues shall cease. However, the way it's practiced today is highly problematic. And now, in many other countries, especially in fear power cultures like Africa or South America, you're going to see a lot more of the spiritual gifts, a lot more of the tongues, the healings, those types of things. And I think in a lot of those countries, it's very legitimate. In the Western American, particularly, church, charismatic church, probably most of the gifts that you see, I would say, are not, at best, they're not anything. They're just grandstanding and sensationalists, but at worst, they're actually demonic in some churches, I would say. There's demonic things happening under the guise of spiritual gifts. But anyway, we're in some similar places on all of that. We should try to find somebody who's hardcore on one or both of those poles. I know some very charismatic people. And I also know some cessationists. We could bring them together. Get both of them together. That'd be the way to do it. It'd be like Pepsi and Mentos. And we could just kind of try to guide, moderate, and clarify. Well, let's invite the charismatic person to speak in tongues. So what we need is a cessationist that doesn't speak our language. He just argues his entire argument in tongues. That doesn't speak our language at all. Charismatic means to speak in tongues to the cessationist who doesn't speak the same language. There you go. put it to the test. Good luck finding somebody to agree to such a circumstance. Welcome to the Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD. I'm Troy Skinner. You can find me at WFMD.com, the Faith Debate page, or might be better and easier to go to HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. I know it doesn't sound easier. It's a lot more keystrokes. But once you get there, it's actually easier because it's a one-stop shop for everything and anything involved with the show, with me, the church I'm involved with. And if you want to connect with Daniel Razvi, the minister he's involved with, ConqueredByLove.org, it's connected to through HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. And he's one of the pastors, by the way, at the church that meets at Imran's house, and part of his extended family is here. Elijah Dirksen is a seminary student. He's a world traveler. Well, he's a North American continent traveler anyway. He just came back from Scotland. That's true. He went out of the country for the first time. Yeah, I heard about that this past month, right? He went to Scotland. It was awesome. Actually, six months ago by the time this airs. that's true that's true yeah yeah as well as we're recording this was just also it's uh not quite six months but yeah a number of months with john knox stood in his church it was it was incredible did you tell him hi for me I have to say, I was talking to Elijah about this topic ahead of time and he said, I never experienced somebody asking for an unspoken prayer request because he doesn't go to one of those heathen churches. You've never experienced it before. I'm coming in this topic almost completely blind. Do you want to give some background on what this is? You see it a lot on social media and you'll hear it in some of the big faceless churches where it's easy to hide. Like a house church, like Household of Faith in Christ or the church that meets at Imran's house. You can't hide in a church like that. So there's no unspoken prayer requests. But in the bigger churches, you don't know each other that well, maybe, and maybe it's an embarrassing thing you're struggling with or whatever, or you're just being... unusually bashful, and you'll just say, would you pray for me? I have an unspoken, and you'll ask them what it's about. Well, it's an unspoken prayer request, but if you can just pray for me. Or, and they may ask, phrase it that way. They may just say, oh, I don't want to share, but I'm going through something. Please pray for me. So it's asking specifically someone else to pray for you. But you'll see it on social media, please pray for me. I have an unspoken prayer request. They actually will use that phrase. And it's like, I can't pray for you because what if your prayer is that give me the strength to axe murder my next door neighbor? I can't, right? How can I pray for it if I don't know what it is? So I would say two things. One is there is a way you could say, well, clearly God, this person is going through something. Please give them wisdom to follow you. Sure. You could pray a general prayer for their faith in Christ. And if they're more specific, which some people are, some people would say, you know, and I've done this before too, where I say, well, I'm going through something I don't really want to talk about too much, but there's something and I'm having trouble being content. with certain things that are happening in my life. And so can you pray for that? Like I can, you know, you might get some detail, you might not get the whole story. Right. And you can say, well, I'm struggling with some, some sin in my life right now that I've identified. And I please pray that I'd be encouraged to fight this. You could do that. That's a little better. What's the benefit? I don't know. I mean, you can, you get, get more people on, uh, in your, uh, in your, uh helping you fight your battle or whatever but they're not they don't know what battle is it seems like the main moral question of this is if someone approaches you as opposed to if you have this this prayer request because I think it's perfectly fine to have some kind of prayer that's just on your heart, between you and God, that you don't speak out loud, and that you can pray silently. Here's my opinion on this. We'll break this into two pieces. The social media component, which is really what drew my attention to it most vociferously. Is that the right word to use there? Inappropriately used large words by Troy Spear. And then there's the church context, the prayer meeting, the church context. On social media, I'm telling you most of the time how it strikes me is it's a desperate plea for attention. My life is hard. Have pity on me. Have pity on me. It's like an inverse virtue signal, right? It's just, put attention on me, please. It's not even an inverse virtue signal. It's a plot out. Well, it's because they're like, oh, look, they were wise enough and mature enough to ask for prayer. Okay, so it's a virtue signal then. Which I'm not a fan of. I'm being persecuted, or I'm going through a rough time, or something like that. I know a lot of people who would consider that to be... What ends up happening a lot of times, it seems to me, is somebody will say... If you're friends with somebody on Facebook, or you're following somebody on Twitter... I'm sorry, fascist book. Fascist book. But if you're connected on one of these platforms, you'll see their things show up in your feed, I think, as it's still possibly called these days. It's probably not called that anymore. It used to be called In Your Feed. But anyway, you'd see stuff show up in your feed or on your wall, maybe it's called. I don't know. and I have an unspoken prayer request, and then a couple weeks later, I have an unspoken prayer request, and then a few weeks later, I have an unspoken prayer request, and then about six months later, I'm filing for divorce. Oh, now I know what all those requests were about. You were basically setting the foundation to have pity when your marriage dissolved, that it wasn't your fault, it was the other person's fault. You were praying for this whole time. Right, exactly. I don't know, it just feels icky. You're basically asking someone to intercede for you in doing evil. And you don't need my... Here's the thing. I believe that prayer is important. We should pray for a variety. We've actually talked about this on a recent show, a variety of reasons that we should pray. And so I'm not dismissing the value of prayer, the power of prayer. Power of prayer, I don't like that phrase. But anyway, there is a powerful thing that happens when people pray. Let's put it that way. And God will move in and use that to shape his people and to accomplish great things in and through his people. I'm not saying anything. However, You, Elijah, don't need me to pray for you. You already have the preeminent intercessor of the universe. praying for you, interceding for you, continually before the throne of God. You don't need me to do it. I don't need you, but as a church, we're commanded to pray for one another. It's one of the one another's. But so you can come up alongside, right? And share in the struggle. You won't tell me what the struggle is. I can't share in the struggle with you. And that would be my issue. Well, that's the whole thing. And I agree. That's the problem with it, not the asking for prayer. I think asking for prayer is a very metaphorical thing to do. Absolutely. But not on social media. Pray for my husband, he's cheating on me. Don't do that on social media. I want to clarify, not all things that would lead someone to get a divorce are evil. I think I spoke a little too quickly. It is not only a good thing to do, but I think God honors it maybe even more so than you just praying for and trying to do it all by yourself with God. And you should be in fellowship with Jesus. Church is a community. It's a body that works together. So while it is certainly true that you don't need other people, God doesn't even need you. God can just fix something without even you asking him. But God commands us to act in certain ways. It's like saying, well, you know, God knows and has already elected who will be saved. So why bother? Well, no, you got to command us to witness, right? So same thing. God commanded us to pray and God commanded us to ask for prayer from other people. So we do that. It's like we're God's tools to accomplish his purposes. In fact, God told Job's friends, you know, ask Job to pray for you. I'll listen to him. I'm not listening to you. I don't like you right now. You know, but if even if they had been believers, I think that would have been something that they should ask, hey, please, you know, please pray for me also. And they should pray too. So that's, I think asking for prayer is not the problem. It's not being willing to say what it is about. And it's because it's embarrassing, whatever. Well, it's embarrassing. Well, then go talk to whoever you could talk to privately, if you don't want to say it publicly. Maybe you can't. Maybe something's maybe too embarrassing to talk to everybody in the whole world about, but talk to somebody. And if you don't have anybody that you can confide in that you trust that much, then you need to be part of a congregation where you can open up to have that level. And a lot of this may depend on the heart of the person asking the question. If it's, I want everyone to notice me, which it seems like that could be the case in a lot of the unspoken prayer requests that we're talking about. then you're in sin. You're asking for prayer in a wrong reason. It's a way to try to virtue signal. I think you've persuaded me. It's a form of virtue signaling that you're some sort of a spiritual person by putting it on social media. And the other thing it does when it's not on social media necessarily, when it's in a prayer group or a church setting or something, boy, you're sounding and maybe even feeling spiritual, but letting yourself off the hook for any accountability. because maybe what you need prayer for is you're really tempted to have an affair with somebody at work, or you're having a hard time being honest on your taxes, and you'll pray for me, but they don't know that's what it's for, so there's no accountability. They don't know if the prayer's being answered or not. That's one of the big dangers of it being unspoken, is that maybe speaking it would allow people to come alongside and help them through it, give them the right directions. Like, hey, maybe you shouldn't divorce. And the other thing is you're you're robbing the situation of the opportunity for God to be glorified. Because if Daniel comes to me and says, I got an unspoken prayer request, would you pray for me? I'm like, sure. God, give Daniel wisdom and whatever the heck he needs to do the right thing to glorify you. Amen, right? Okay, pray better than that, right? But that's fine. But he says, pray for me. I've got a really critical business decision to make and I'm really unsure. And I've already tried casting lots, but the dice were broken. So I'm just not sure I really need wisdom and discernment. And then when you make the decision, I can celebrate with you and God gets the glory for helping you arrive at a decision. the amount of detail you gave there doesn't have to be all the detail. I could say, hey, Troy, I have a business decision to make, pray for that I make the right decision. I don't have to tell you, well, it's between merging with this company and declaring bankruptcy, and also, I don't have to give you all the details. I can say, well, this is- But when I see you next week at church, You could ask me, hey, how's your business going? You say, you know what? I appreciate your prayers. I've made a decision and I feel really good about it. And I'm like, praise God. And they answered the prayer. You can't do that if it's an unspoken thing. That goes right back to the body of Christ and how we're supposed to live with each other. We're supposed to Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. We can't do that if we don't communicate within the body. And that communication, I think, is really important. So we know when to pray for someone, when to weep for someone, when to rejoice with one another and build each other up. And it helps people to know that others have the same kinds of struggles you have. If everybody's got these unspoken, we might imagine that there's 100 people in my church and they all have 100 different things that they're worried about. But when they actually share what their unspoken requests are, you realize, oh, it's like the same four things divided. Twenty-five people have, you know, one of the four, right, each kind of thing. And so, yeah, I'm really struggling with this. So if you would, pray for me. Listener to the faith debate. By the way, I have some unspoken prayer requests. If you can pray for those, too, I'd appreciate it. See the difference? If that's you, if you happen to hear this and you're one of those social media virtual signals, stop, please don't do that. And if it really is something that you are struggling with, that you're too afraid or embarrassed to mention publicly, well then just don't say anything publicly. Anybody remember that old movie, Bambi? Everybody's heard of Bambi. Not everybody apparently, as of a couple weeks ago, has heard of Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, but everyone's heard of Bambi. Or even Derry McQuire, right? So in Bambi, there's this rabbit called Thumper, right? In the beginning. And do you remember what he says? It's been a long time since you saw this movie. He's kind of wobbly. Yeah, he said that. But then he says some insult or makes fun of Bambi in some way. And his mother said, hey, what did your father tell you? And he says, if you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all, right? So that's actually a great principle. If you can't actually legitimately ask for prayer from somebody, then just don't say it. Find someone that you can actually confide in that is a brother or sister in Christ. It's also a believer, right? Don't confide in unbelievers. Confide in believers and ask for advice or prayer from them. If you have to do that privately and in confidence, say, well, please don't share this with other people. And I've done that before. I've been going through something where I share with a believer that I know, a brother or sister in Christ, whether it's a family member or a friend or somebody in the church or a pastor, and I say, I'm struggling with this. Please pray for me. I don't feel comfortable with you sharing with other people, even in the congregation, but just pray for me yourself. And they say, sure, I can do that. And you know, that's reasonable. And it's certainly reasonable that there may be something that you don't feel comfortable sharing with others, but you can open up to somebody, but then open up about the specific thing to whatever extent. Because also they can give you counsel. Right. Yeah. I think something that goes hand in hand with this is someone asks you to pray about something. And then you say, oh, sure, I'll pray about that. And then you forget about it. You know, pray right then. Yep. Unless there's something I always I call into right there. I say, oh, I'll be praying for you. And I think back and actually pray for them. I don't think I did. Whoever shared this story on the show, you might know because you've been a majority of the show's last few years. Daniel, Elijah, unless I happen to share on the show when you were here about Nancy Pelosi. Saint, you pray for somebody? No. There was some tragedy, it was a few years ago, probably right around the time maybe that you started being a regular on the show, Daniel, so maybe. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it. Anyway, and it was one of those talking head shows, and it was a father and a daughter being on a single shot camera, being interviewed by the talking head newsman. And on a different screen, like in Washington, D.C. somewhere, was Nancy Pelosi. And so it's like a three-way screen thing. You've seen this set up on the talking head shows all the time, right? And there's some tragedy. I can't remember the tragedy exactly. I don't know if it was a hurricane, I don't know, something. Something that Nancy Pelosi would care about. Mass shooting, maybe. Mass shooting, maybe, right. Yeah, that's something. It probably was, because that's the kind of thing Nancy Pelosi would come on to be a guest about, right? And so they're talking about this thing, and it's this horrible, tragic thing, and the father's distraught, the teenage girl is distraught. and Nancy's opining and giving her pearls of wisdom. It's radio, right? You couldn't see my facial expressions. And she says, towards the end of this interview, would it be okay if I prayed for you? She says this on the show, which is a little shocking to me as a viewer. Nancy Pelosi is going to pray for this person on national television? I got to see this. Well, she's a Catholic, right? So now the dad is like, Oh yeah, absolutely. If you would please. And the teenage girl, she's like 13 years old. She's so moved by the gesture that Nancy Pelosi, who was then speaker of the house, is going to be, I think she was Speaker of the House, certainly a high-ranking Democrat official, is going to pray for her on national television. She actually starts to well up. She's about to cry. Her lip starts to quiver. She's so moved by this. And Nancy Pelosi says, okay, then I will when I get home later or something like that. And all you could see the girl, like she felt she was defeated and the dad looked like, Broken and unimpressed like Okay, so if you're going to say is it first of all, you don't have to say is it okay to pray for you? Really, but if you're going to use that language, it's not wrong to say that language Hey, but it might be do you have time right? So is it okay if I pray for you if the answer is yes, say okay pray Maybe even better would be can I say can I pray with you? Right? Yeah, but don't It depends on who you're talking to. If you know the person's a believer, then yeah, might I pray with you? Let's pray together. If you're not so sure, they might be. We had a Christian couple over to our house. My wife met the wife end of the couple. They came over for dinner and we had some fellowship and stuff. First time I had met either one of them. We decided that it was a good fellowship, a good meal, a good time. It just felt right. about some of the things we're talking about during the time that we should end our evening with prayer. And so I prayed. My wife prayed. That was it. These were Christians, supposedly. They weren't comfortable praying. So you can't assume that he's going to pray with you. True, true. But even the gesture of, let's pray together. I'm going to be the only one talking, but we're going to be doing it as a body. I think that's even important. And I have done that, not as often as I should, but I have done that. And I got to say, it's usually a pretty powerful thing, even for the ones doing the praying. But oftentimes for the ones being prayed for, it's like, wow, you're like the real deal. Like you really believe what you claim to believe because you're actually being vulnerable with me and praying, it's also an opportunity to witness and, you know, absolutely share the reason for the hope you have with it, right? I mean, it's a really beautiful, we should do it more often than we do. We've got about five, six minutes maybe-ish left in the show. I don't know that there's a whole lot more for us to say about the virtue signaling with the unspoken prayer request, except for this. if somebody wanted to push back, because we're all pretty much in agreement, if somebody wanted to push back. And they're wrong. Probably, right? I can't for the life of me think of a biblical precedent for Unspoken prayer request is there I can think of I can think a lot of Like keeping your own prayer request in your heart because God knows your heart but not asking someone else to pray for you But not telling them right. Yeah, I think I think when you first heard the term you were thinking I was thinking like Hannah about pray praying silently You know I can't or just when God when Jesus says go go and pray in your closet by yourself instead of openly or whatever So you're not making a scene But I would actually argue that if you're asking like, oh, unspoken prayer, that actually is making a scene. That's like a public parasitical type of thing. So yeah, I can't think of any, even any argument for why it would be. The only thing that I can see that where pastors might feel like they can allow it in their congregations for people to say is because they don't want to put somebody in the spot, make them embarrassed or whatever. okay well then we're not going to pray for something unspoken. If you want to talk to me about it privately, I'll be happy to pray for you privately about it if you don't want to share it in front of the congregation. But we're going to pray about real requests that we all can be around. I think as a pastor, if you're a pastor listening to this, take a firm stance on that. Say, look, I would love to pray for you. If you want to share with me what it is, if you just want me to pray, you can even be as vague as you want and say, pastor, pray for me that I have a closer walk with God. That's fine, I'll pray for that. But you need to at least say something that you want me to pray for, not just some random thing. If not, you can talk to me privately, and I'm happy to keep confidence as your pastor and not share it with you, not share it with other people. That's fine. We would encourage you to share as much as you can about your private life so that we can all encourage each other and strengthen each other. But that's, I think, what you should take. Your walk as a Christian is not a walk alone. It's a walk with the rest of the body. And walking and interacting with people requires communication. If you're not doing that, there's some type of break in that relationship. And I've also had times when I have, of my own accord, voluntarily prayed for someone with what I knew to be an unspoken prayer request, but here's how that happened. You're talking to somebody, or you're walking up to somebody, you see them, and you can just tell their demeanor's not normal. And you're like, hey, you doing okay? You look maybe a little downcast or a little preoccupied, you all right? You're just having a rough time. Well, anything I can help with? It's something with my family. To be honest, I really don't want to get into it. It involves people that you don't really know that well. But it's a struggle. I guess I'm trying not to have it show, but obviously it shows. I appreciate you asking and checking in on me. You know what? I'll be praying for you. I don't know any more than that. But you know enough. Exactly. There's something weighing heavy on the heart. It has something to do with something that I'm not really supposed to know a lot about because it's embarrassing to people that it's not my place to know. But I will, I don't know what it is specifically, but I have a sense and I will pray for that. But that's different than the guy walking up, got a lot of stuff going on, unspoken prayer request. Would you pray for me? No. I'm sorry, I can't do that. Again, how do I know your prayer isn't, I'm really wrestling with whether or not I should ask murder my next door neighbor. I can't pray that God would help you in that matter. So anyway, shows coming up on the docket. Next week, we're planning to talk about cremation and whether or not cremation is a sin. Okay, so we'll unpack his opinion on that next week. And the week after that, if things go according to plan, we'll be talking about Samuel, the Old Testament prophet, and whether or not he was raised from the dead, as we have the narrative described for us in 1 Samuel 28. So if you want to do your homework, listener, open your Bible to 1 Samuel. but he will be raised from the dead at the last time. Not second Samuel and certainly not third Samuel. If you have a third Samuel, get a new Bible. So those are topics. Now we got like literally three minutes left. So I did this on purpose. I don't want to turn, this is a show by itself, but we had an interesting little three minute chat in between shows about continuationism and cessationism. So in like 60 seconds a piece, What's your general take on that? Because I thought it was an interesting thing, and you did it really quick between shows. I would say my position is a very mild continuationalist. I can't find any passage in the New Testament that says, well, God will never speak to these people again, or God will never allow someone to speak in a different language to reach a tribe that wouldn't otherwise be able to hear them, or something like that. I think a lot of charismatics go too far, misunderstand what the sign gifts actually were, and I think they are a lot less pronounced than they were when we did not have a complete revelation. Okay. And I would kind of agree with that, just so you're aware, a cessationist is often A lot of Baptists will be cessationists, not all, but many Baptists will be cessationists, and they'll take a verse in Corinthians that says, what you have, tongues shall cease, meaning they're not that important compared to love, and they will say, Proves that they will cease and in fact they have ceased as soon as the cannon was closed god stopped working in miracles in that way With speaking in tongues and and healings and and stuff like that Um, I don't I don't agree. I think that's that's a gross. Uh, um, uh, mixed mischaracterization mischaracterization of what that pastor is talking about Uh, and in fact, I think the bible does strongly implied there will always be spiritual gifts being at work I do think that most Most may not be a great word depending on which church you think I'm including in this in this generalization, but a lot. of so-called charismatic churches, I think, are, at best, practicing spiritual gifts the wrong way, and at worst, actually flirting with the demonic in many of the things. And when I say demonic, a lot of these are churches that we wouldn't even call saved churches in the first place. They're not preaching the same gospel. So there's other things going on. It's not just, well, you have great doctrine, except you also speak in tongues, and so therefore, no. That's not what I'm talking about. But I do think it's important. But I've met people, like I met a pastor from India who goes around to different tribes in India, and he speaks the gospel, preaches the gospel in his own native tongue. He doesn't speak the language of these other people, but they hear him. And his whole ministry has been that way. That's what real speaking in tongues is, not just some random babbling in the church service. So I think if you're going to practice spiritual gifts, definitely read the Bible and see how they're applied and do it that way. But I would not be saying, that if you preach that you have to speak in tongues in order to prove that you're saved, you know, and otherwise you're not really saved, I disagree with that. Yeah, and I think that it's important to make a distinction that nobody's complete cessationist because there are spiritual gifts. We're talking specifically about a subset of the charisms, what are called the sign gifts. But if you want to look that up and do some study yourself, look specifically at the sign gifts and are those still active in the church today or what does that mean? I don't have time to unpack it, I've got like 15 seconds left, so I can't really give my full opinion on this, but it's not wildly different than what those guys had to say. I'd have some nuances I would add, but that's about it. So anyway, Elijah Dirksen, Daniel Rasby, I'm Troy Skinner. This is the Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD, online at wfmd.com and householdoffaithinchrist.com. Until next week, 167 and a half hours from now, God bless. To be perfectly honest, I think I agree more closely with cessationists than I do with most charismatics. There's a discussion between Michael Brown and Sam Storms and who's the guy, the cessationist? I was nodding along. John MacArthur? No, it wasn't John MacArthur. Justin Peters? Justin Peters, yeah. Okay. Because he had that whole strange fire conference. Yeah, I was listening to that discussion. I was agreeing with Justin Peters most of the time. But I would consider myself more in the continuation. Well, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, two things can be true at once. Correct. They're both wrong. Charismatics can be practicing the gifts in the wrong way, and the gifts could still exist. Those things can both be true. Yeah. And yeah, I would, I would agree. Now I do know and I fellowship with it because I don't think this is something that is fellowship or I fellowship with people regularly, who would argue that if you're not evidencing these spiritual gifts in your daily walk with Christ and. That's like one of the main fruits of salvation, and you should really look carefully to see if you really are saved. If you're not actively speaking in tongues, both privately and publicly, and, you know, healing the sick and raising the dead and all that, if you're not doing that, then you probably, you know, have some suspicion about your salvation. And they wouldn't, most of these people wouldn't go as far to say that, well, you're definitely not saved. But they would say, well, I have my doubts if you're not speaking in tongues that much. It's like something you should immediately do as soon as you receive the Holy Spirit. And I have a problem with that theology. I don't think it matters because even these same people would agree that what saves you is Christ's blood and resurrection, not speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues just happens to be a fruit. And we both agree that if you're not showing fruit, that's probably a reason to think that you might not be saved. But the Bible says only some people will have the gift of speaking in tongues. I agree, that's a great rebuttal for that, and that's why I don't believe it. But again, we talked about, and Troy just mentioned that, I mean, you can fellowship with a wide variety of people. You need to make sure the gospel is correct, and I would say, and the urgency of scripture is really key. But you can have some really, and we have some very wide variety of doctrines we disagree on, but that doesn't mean we're not brothers in Christ, and so it's important to keep that in mind. start this show with a little bit of some of the things that left over from last show just because I feel like there's a lot more you guys want to say and we'll see how it goes. Welcome to the Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD. I'm Troy Skinner, joined this week by Elijah Dirksen. He's a seminary student. He's traveled all around, basically from like the Mississippi River-ish region all the way over to Scotland and parts in between. And he made a pit stop here in Frederick, Maryland. He's a big world traveler. Big world traveler. And Daniel Rasby, he doesn't do as much world travel, I don't think. He spends a lot of time in his car, I know that. Enough time to take wrong turns on occasion, I understand. But we'll leave that story for another time. You can find his ministry and his family's ministry at conqueredbylove.org. He's one of the pastors Daniel is at the church that meets at Imran's house. And I'm the pastor of Household of Faith in Christ online at householdoffaithinchrist.com. We're going to be talking about cremation. But real quickly, just to put a button on a couple of things. I meant to ask this question last week, and I didn't. We were talking last week about unspoken prayer requests, and I can't believe I forgot to ask this question. It feels to me like that's a newer thing. I don't think that Christians were going up to each other with unspoken prayer requests 150 years ago. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't get the sense. If I'm right, do you think it's a modern invention? And what's up? Because I think it has to do with the emergence of the mega churches where people don't really know people to go to church with. And then on top of that, piggybacking on that, the social media world where nobody knows anybody. I've got thousands of friends, apparently, who I've never met and never will. To say it. didn't exist before a certain period of time would, for one, require an encyclopedic knowledge of church history, which I know I don't have. I do. But even then, not everything is recorded, too. It's very hard to prove a negative, right? So it's possible. I don't think it was a widespread movement like maybe it is now. And I do feel like you're on the right track. It probably has to do with the megachurches. More than specifically, Vega Church is just the general idea of not being in close fellowship with him. And this is something I think even most smaller churches get wrong in the way they run church these days. Even if you're a pastor, you only have 100 people in your congregation. How many pastors are there, even if you're preaching the gospel every Sunday, even if you're reading the Bible and you believe in the inerrancy of scripture and all that, you get great sound doctrine, how many of these pastors, and if you're a pastor, listen to this, examine yourself. Are you actually shepherding your flock? Do you actually intimately know the lives of every single one of the people that goes to your congregation? And if not, then what are you pastoring? And the answer is a clear no at some point. You're not supposed to be just a preacher. If you're only a preacher, that's not a pastor. A pastor is a shepherd. You should be shepherding the flock. You need to know the flock in order to shepherd them. From my understanding, pastoring is about 90% shepherding and then 10% preaching. But most people approach church very differently. And most seminaries are not teaching necessarily people to be shepherds. They're teaching them how to do great word studies, and create good doctrinal arguments and then have a great sermon and then also maybe evangelize if you get around to it but not shepherding and discipling the flock and there's really not a lot of discipling going on they may assign somebody to disciple somebody oh yeah you mentor this new believer well okay that that's fine but you need to be the one leading and and everybody should know everybody in the congregation if your church is big enough that everybody doesn't know everybody like on a first name basis with everybody in the congregation then I would say it's probably too big. Yeah, and I don't know what that number is, but at some point you hit that number. I think churches up to 100, you can probably know everybody by name and have some relationships. And maybe even 200. Maybe even 200. Do kids and big families count? I think anybody that's, anybody that is professing to be saved, you need, as a pastor, you need to intimately know them, I would say. I think the pastor should know all the kids' names. Should every member know all the kids' names of a huge family, if there's a bunch of big families? To some extent. Over time, yes. I was somewhat joking. We have a lot of little kids in our church. But in seriousness, maybe, I think, you know, I don't want to put people on a guilt trip. So if you've got several big families in your church and you've only been going to that church for a relatively short amount of time, No pressure. You have to remember their names forever. But within a year or two, because they should have been over to your house, and you should have been over to their house, and you should be praying for them. And if you don't know their name, you're not praying for them. So within a year, you probably should know all the kids' names. But within a month or two, no. But also, as far as discipling, it's not necessarily the pastor's job to be discipling the kids. That's the parent's job, but the pastor should have intimate knowledge of all the ins and outs of what's going on in the family through conversations with the parents. And I'm very much in favor of that structure where the pastor is discipling the men in the church, and the men are still leading their individual families. But that doesn't mean the pastor has no say or has no bit of advice to give, you know, with the kids and all that. I am against Sunday school and teaching kids separately apart from their parents. But so just to kind of clarify. So in answer to your question then about kids, Elijah, I would say at least you need to intimately know all the adults in the congregation. that are professing to be believers, and that's who you're going to be discipling. For sure. Yeah, at a minimum. But I agree with the spirit of where you're coming from, that the parents need to be discipling their children, but I don't think to the exclusion of the pastor being involved in teaching and training up a disciple, and they're shepherding the entire flock. Everybody who's showing up for church is there, and the pastor should be, at the very least, should know their names. And the pastor doesn't have a year to learn the names. The pastor should learn the names of the kids very, very quickly. He should make it a point to know their names immediately so that the very next week when you see those kids again, you can go to them and call them by name. It needs to be a purposeful action that the pastor takes because you want those kids to feel like they belong and they're welcome. and that you care about them, and you can't remember their name. So you've gotta make yourself flashcard something, but between one Sunday and the next, or one Saturday and the next, whenever your church meets, you've gotta commit those names to memory. This is one reason I believe so strongly in the house church movement, and I'm so against buildings. Not because I can point to a verse that says a building is unbiblical, and not because I think that there aren't any biblical churches that have buildings. There's plenty that don't need houses that are very biblical churches. But I believe that Once you start to focus on, well, we need a building because we're too big to fit in the house, well, maybe you're too big to be a church then too, right? We just mentioned there's probably a bleed over where you're too big to be in a house, but not too big to be a church. But that's not a very large, not a very wide margin. Once you're too big to be in a house, it's going to be very quickly, if you keep growing, that you're going to be too big to adequately disciple the flock. Well, I think you could have a church structure that could handle a lot of families, a large amount of people within it. It just needs more elders, in my opinion. Yeah, it needs more elders and accountability and structure within that eldership. So it's possible, and there are some very large churches that I think seem to be run biblically and efficiently, but you do have a danger once you get big to have to start treating it as a business and trying to grow the business rather than, you know, discipling and giving, building mature believers. I think that puts a bow and then some on our unspoken prayer requests sent from last week. We also ended last week's show, I asked the two guest panelists to share really quickly their view on cessationism versus continuationism because it came up in between shows. And I thought they did a really nice job of representing their views in a very succinct way. And I thought, oh, that might be, if we have time, we have like three minutes at the end of the show, we might have time to do that. And sure enough, we did. But in fairness, I didn't have a chance to share it. I'm not trying to put somebody on the spot and then not put myself on the spot. Not that anybody cares what I think about this. I think that, as I said last week, these guys are kind of waffling somewhere in the middle, neither full hardcore cessationist nor full hardcore continuationist. To be clear, I am 100 percent a continuous. I believe none of the gifts have ceased and will never cease until So I misrepresented what you were trying to say. But I believe that the way that the gifts are practiced in most of the American churches that practice gifts, specifically, is unbiblical. So that's what I would say. So here's broad brush strokes. I think that we would have a lot of help in this discussion among believers if we would use the word languages instead of tongues. That would make it clearer, I think, what the Bible is really talking about there, because I think it's talking about languages. It's not talking about guttural sounds. They would say it's angelic languages, though. But it's still a language. No, no, the charismatics would say that when they're speaking. It would still be a language. It would have some sort of syntax. It would be intelligible at some level, even to the angels. Now, I'm not so sure I buy that argument, by the way, but it would still have to be a language. Otherwise, it's gibberish. I think most of them believe that it is a language. If the angels have their own language, it's not different. But if you hear the people that speak in tongues, they don't all necessarily sound like they're speaking the same language necessarily. But also, why would we think that there is only one language, a spiritual language? So anyway, I think that would really help. I think that designating some gifts as like spiritual gifts generally versus sign gifts specifically, I think is helpful. Because then you can start to make a biblical argument that leans in the direction that Elijah was going in last week, which is, okay, whenever these particular kinds of gifts show up, they are attestations that the person speaking is truly representing God. This is an apostle. This person knows what they're talking about. This is somebody who can heal someone. Therefore, what he says must be true. This is someone who can... I speak Russian. I know he doesn't speak Russian. All of a sudden, he's speaking and I'm understanding him. Like, okay, that's supernatural. What this guy is saying has credibility behind it. And to your point last week, Elijah, before we had what we consider to be now a full canon, So we get the authority and the proof of the authority from, does it accord with God's revealed written word? Absolutely. But the fullness of God's revealed written word wasn't available yet. And so what other proof she got for me? Well, how about if I speak in a language that I don't know that you can understand? Might that surprise you? What if I heal your lame sense birth child? Would that persuade you? Things like that. Now, I agree with Daniel that I can't There's no ironclad argument, as far as I can tell, that says they've stopped. So here's what I think. This is kind of where I am for the moment. I've mushed around this issue for years. I think that if the Bible isn't clear that they've stopped, we need to be open to them still being available. However, If it seems true, and I think it is true, that the Bible has these gifts show up at key times for key individuals, for key moments in the historical narrative for the Church of God's people, then we shouldn't be expecting them as everyday, normal, run-of-the-mill occurrences. They should be special, rare, wow situations. And so if somebody's in the jungle of Africa, and they all of a sudden can supernaturally speak Swahili or something, whatever they speak in the jungles of Africa, I'm open to that possibility. And I would not automatically discount somebody's testimony as saying that they did that or they saw somebody do that. I'd be open to that. I'd be a little bit suspicious because there's so many charlatans, but I would not discount it out of hand. But most of what passes for the gifts, the sign gifts and their usage in today's American church, is highly problematic. It's akin to superstition, and it's cultic, and it really makes me nervous that people don't know their Bibles well enough. So anyway, in full disclosure, that's all that. So now we've got about, let's see, about 15-ish minutes to talk about cremation. Is it a sin to have a body cremated? It doesn't take you that long to cremate somebody, right? How long does it take? I don't know how long. A few minutes, probably? I've never been cremated before. You don't say. Would you mind cremating yourself and then come back and report it? Let us know how long it took. So I have a little, I think my opinion on this is controversial among Christians. By the way, the answer to that question probably depends on the intensity of the heat. Probably. Right. I think my opinion on this may be controversial among Christians because I think most Christians, having not thought about the issue much, would just assume, well, why not? I mean, it's cheaper than burial. Might as well do it. I actually do think that it matters. And there's a good case you can make to say, well, the body doesn't matter. Once you're dead, your soul's not in it. Who cares? It's not there. Well, on the one hand, that's true to some extent. Yes, your spirit's no longer there once you've died. You're either in heaven or hell, right? Hopefully heaven, because you had a relationship with God. You were elected, you were chosen and predestinated. We talked about this a few weeks ago. There was a two-week discussion. I missed out. You missed out. But anyway, hopefully... You would have loved it. You're in heaven. I'm sure I would have. But even if you're in hell, wherever you are, you're not there in that body anymore, right? So what does it matter what you do with it? You could make that case except that the Bible talks about burial as a really important thing to respectfully deal with dead bodies and not to just flippantly deal with their bodies. It does talk about that very specifically and it's shown that it was very good and honorable what was done to the body of Jesus. and to make sure it was, you know, prepared properly and wrapped properly and placed in a good place. And it's not just because he's our Lord. There's all throughout scripture these examples. And, you know, even they brought the bones of Joseph out of Egypt to bury them in the right place when we finally got there, like they saved them. They didn't lose them. They want to make sure we bear it. It's not a superstitious thing. This is a godly thing. In fact, Ecclesiastes makes a really big deal. Remember that passage that says, if a man has a hundred children and he lives many, many years, people would think, well, that's a great life. But these two things are not there. He didn't live, his day is not filled with good. So that's a pretty bad thing. And also he wasn't buried properly. Well, then it's might as well be a miscarriage. This life was not worth anything, right? So yes, I realize that one of the things that they were saying was bad about his life was that he didn't have good filled in his life. So that's definitely a big thing. But equally listed in there is that he wasn't buried properly. Like that's how important it was to the writer of Ecclesiastes anyway. And I know that you don't necessarily gonna get all your doctrine out of Ecclesiastes, kind of like in Proverbs, you're not getting commandments necessarily out of Proverbs. like you do out of certain passages, but they're generally good life principles and it does seem that God does place importance on burial as opposed to other ways of treating dead bodies. So are you in agreement or disagreement? I would need to know what is the actual question that we're discussing. Is it, is cremation a sin or is it preferable to be buried? The specific question is, is it a sin? I would say no. And then, and are you saying it's a sin or you're just saying it's not preferable, Daniel? I'm saying it's strongly unpreferable to the point where I wouldn't say it's a sin. And the reason I wouldn't say it's a sin is because I don't see any commandment in scripture that you must always bury. But many cultures, many pagan cultures have rituals in death having to do with fire and burning bodies. That is not the way that Israel was practicing, and there's never an example given of burning a body in scripture that is given in a good way. I don't even know if it's mentioned at all, but many cultures around the world that have rituals with burning bodies and it's usually in a cult type ritual. So it is a spiritual type of ritual. And I think that's so I know there's a very strong Christian tradition and going back through Jewish tradition as well of burial of the bodies. to the point where when the Romans would capture the Christians, they would burn them, either to kill them or after they've been killed, and then cast their ashes in the Tiber to kind of thumb their nose at God, try being resurrected now type of thing. Kind of like they did to create the name of the state of Palestine to thumb the nose of the Jews. Probably, probably. It's one of those things where there was this tradition that the Romans were saying, well, you can't be resurrected if you're burned. Kind of misunderstanding resurrection, in my opinion. Because God doesn't need all of your ashes to be together, or your entire body to be together, or necessarily buried to be resurrected. I don't, like Daniel said, I don't think there's any specific passage that dictates how you're supposed to be buried or how your remains are supposed to be disposed of. But that being said, I think that burial does provide a great picture of our lives. We're buried with Christ and then we'll be raised on the last day. It most closely aligns with the picture of resurrection and that most closely aligns with the picture of the burial, which is why That's what I want to be, because I want to provide that symbolic picture of my life. And that might not happen. I might get burned at the stake, or I might get lost at sea, or something like that. I'm still going to be raised, Lord willing. I believe I'm a Christian. And so I'll be raised on the last day, regardless of whether I'm buried or not. But I want to provide that picture. Yeah, so I don't think it's a sin, and I'm not even sure that I'm convinced it's particularly preferable. I do agree when Daniel was talking about we need to have respect for the body, respect for the dead person. I don't buy into Except if they're an evil king in Canaan, you can cut off their thousands. You know, I don't agree with the sentiment that you hear so often at present day funerals that say, you know, well, he's not really there. She's not really there. It's just their shell. No, that's really them. It's not all that they were. It's not it's not fully them. They were there. There's a spiritual component to us as well. So our spiritual aspects are really us. But our physical body is really us, too. We're not just going to be raised as a spirit. Job said, I'm going to see my Savior with my eyes, with my physical body. So I think that just discovering the body doesn't mean anything. I agree. We don't want to go there. We need to have respect and honor and appreciation for, I mean, I did it with my pet dog for crying out loud. My dog, we had her for 17 years and she finally breathed her last and it broke me up for, I mean, I was really emotional for weeks after that. And in that moment, she's dead. I know that she's dead and I'm still petting her, caressing her, talking to her, kissing her, right? She's dead. Why? Because it's still her. The life force is gone, but the body is still there. And so I think it's totally appropriate. If you're at the hospital, a loved one dies in their hospital bed, or they die at home or whatever, and you see them... That is not a violation of the commandment that says, don't talk to the dead or whatever. That's not what that's talking about. That's not creating witchcraft to try to bring... And we're going to talk about bringing back Samuel from the dead. So that might be a good segue. I don't know if we have time on this show or not. We got like three minutes, four minutes, so maybe not. But that definitely is something. But I do think... just as a general Christian principle, yes, you should have respect, not respect for the dead in that sense necessarily, but respect for the body. I mean, this is still a creation of God. I will say you brought up Ecclesiastes. And I only know this because I just came back from a sermon workshop where we were focusing entirely on Ecclesiastes. But that passage talking about you're not going to be buried, I think it's more talking about you're not going to be remembered. They're not going to have that marker. telling people about you. And that was a point I was actually going to get to. So we don't have burning, but we do have other cultural burial practices in the Bible. We have embalming. And that's not condemned. It wasn't that Joseph was embalmed. Right. Exactly. So it wasn't the stereotypical Israeli burial. Even burial as we do it today wasn't what they were doing even in Jesus's time. Jesus wasn't buried down in the ground. He was buried into a tomb in a wall. Right. Yeah. We've got examples of people being buried in tombs, being buried in the dirt, being embalmed before they're then buried somehow. On the other side, we have cultures, pagan cultures, that will bury someone in the ground or dig a hole, put them in a lot of the natives to the American continent. pagan to the core, and yet a lot of them had their ancient burial grounds and stuff. So I don't know the cultural arguments. We have this one story about them not having time to bury somebody, and that ended up really working out well for that guy. He touched the bones of Elijah. He just got thrown there, and he came back to life. Was it Elijah or Elisha? Elisha. Elisha. OK. Yeah, so if you don't know the story, look it up. It's a really cool story that Elisha had died, and his bones were there, and then They were going to bury somebody else years later. And there was a raiding party that came out, bandits or foreign army or whatever. So they didn't have time to bury him. They just threw him in the same tomb where Elisha was. As soon as he touched the bones of Elisha, he came back to life. Now, this is probably where a lot of people get their talismans. It's like, oh, you see, if you just touch this, you'll touch this. Iconography. Yeah. What do you do with that? That's maybe a whole other topic we could talk about, because clearly God has worked in that way in the past, not only with Elisha, but with, was it Peter or Paul, standing in his handkerchief different places, people touching him and he got healed? I don't remember that story. Let me put a button on the cremation thing so we don't have to carry over thoughts into next week's show, because that's always a little bit awkward. Sometimes it's good to do it, and it's, I think, appropriate and fun to do it. But in this case, I think we're going to need all the time we can get to talk about Samuel being raised from the dead next week. So I think, for me, it comes down to the attitude and the approach. So if you're going to be like, ah, he's dead, just throw some dirt on him, that's not an appropriate burial either. If it's a, they're not really, it's just a shell, it's not really a person, but who cares? Let's just, let's just throw them in the oven and cremate them, who cares? That's not the right approach. But if it's, we're going to do it honoring and respectfully, and we're going to do something honoring and respectful with the ashes, then we're paying homage to the person, remembering them, we're in step with what's being taught in Ecclesiastes. I think that's the important thing because ultimately, you know, we come from dust, we return to dust. Cremation is just expediting that process and instead of it taking decades and decades and decades, it takes minutes. So the process is the same. And it also begs the question about the martyrs who were burned at the stake. Did they have a more cursed kind of situation because they didn't have a burial, because they were burned to ash at the stake? They had an honorable death. They were martyrs. And so there's all sorts of ancillary things that swirl around the question. If it's merely practical and I'm too cheap, I don't want to spend the money, then your attitude might need to check. But if it's like, hey, it was the person's wishes to be cremated, and we're going to do something really special and honorable with the ashes afterwards, I think that's the same as a burial in my mind. As a Christian tradition, I think it's good. I think it symbolizes good things. Burial does. I think it's a good tradition. I don't think it's a sin not to do it, though. And that'll have to be the final word. Elijah Dirksen sneaks in at the final buzzer. That wasn't me buzzing his answer. That was me in the final buzzer. That wasn't the pejorative buzz. That was a positive kind of buzz, I guess. Anyway, also Daniel Rasby's on the show. I'm Troy Skinner. Thanks so much for listening. The death and resurrection, supposedly, of Samuel, or not resurrection, the conjured from the dead, is next week on The Faith Debate, 167 and a half hours from now. God bless. By the way, are we being bugged by the world's most obvious spy? Yes, I think that's the microphone. Oh, that? No, no, the thing on top. Oh, yeah. These are new microphones. The old ones went kaput. And so this is actually for the live stream. I got you. This is actually Acts 19.12. This is the first time we're using these, by the way. I hope they're working. That's the analogous passage in the New Testament to the bones of Elisha. And that's also, I think, where they get a lot of iconography. Oops, that's wrong. For some reason, I trust you. I just, for some reason, I didn't remember it. What is it? You're telling me a weird verse? 1912. Yeah. What's the topic? I'm sorry, I was distracted. It's the handkerchief of Paul being taken to the sick. But that still fits within the idea of the specialness of the sacraments. And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them. Interesting. So, the, like, well, there's so many people to heal. Let's take this to them, take this to them. And that's really, that's a dagger to the present day American charismatic Pentecostal movement because you don't see people taking like Benny Hinn's handkerchiefs to hospitals and healing people. Oh yeah. Right? If you had consistent healings that were done, you would know about it, right? It'd be on the front page of the newspapers. Well, there aren't newspapers. It'd be on the headline banners of all the websites, you know? Absolutely. Except that godly things often don't get publicized that much because the world doesn't want to publicize them. If all of a sudden like a hundred people miraculously healed at Johns Hopkins Hospital, you don't think they'd report on that? I don't know. As jaded as I am, I think they would. And I'm pretty jaded. They wouldn't maybe give credit to God. They would just talk about there's some weird anomaly. They'd give credit to the doctors or something, I don't know, but. Not the handkerchief that everyone was blowing their nose into. Yeah, we'd hear about it. Oh, that's like violating the COVID protocols, I believe. Handkerchief, bad. See, that's where they got the idea. You just put the handkerchief around your face and you get healed from COVID. I knew there was something to learn about that that I was missing. Oh, there's the death of Samuel. I figure I probably better open it up for this next time. All right, here we go. Welcome to the Faith Debate on News Radio 930 WFMD. Thanks for spending part of your day with us, whether you're listening live on the radio or later on podcasts. We certainly do appreciate it. If you want to connect with the podcast, you can do that at WFMD.com, or you can also go to HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. I know it's a mouthful, but that's the name of the church I pastor, HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com. And from there, you can link to all my social media accounts. I've got like, I don't know, eight or ten of them. You can link to all the faith debate stuff. I do some other podcast-oriented ministry stuff. One of them is called Decorating Date Night. You can check that out. If you want to check out Daniel Rasby, he's one of the panelists this week. If you want to check out one of the ministries that he and his family, or he didn't, his family founded and he's involved with. You can do that. You can link there. It's conquerbylove.org. And I don't have anything that links to our other guest on this week's show, Elijah Dirksen, but I'll tell you what, if you want to get in touch with him, go to householdoffaithinchrist.com. You'll find my email, my phone number, and everything is there too. Text me, email me, whatever, and I can pass along a message. I can get you in touch. Even if you're a fan. That's like two times in the last three weeks I forgot to turn my mic on. What was that? You can only do that if you're a fan though. So if you're spinning ceaselessly in circles, then you are allowed to message me about Elijah. Good to know. If you're trying to kill birds, if you've bought into the woke agenda, the green agenda, you're all about, you think you're going to solve the world with windmills. then you can text me or email me and connect with Elijah. So anyway, all right, so let me see if I can find it. Here it is. There's a passage in the Bible, 1 Samuel chapter 28, no? So the setup here is that Saul is a king, and not to be confused with the Saul who became Paul in the New Testament. or became known as Paul in the New Testament. I don't think he really changed his name. One's a Hebrew name and one's a Greek name. It's the same name, basically, in the New Testament. But anyway, there's a king in the Old Testament named Saul, and he did some bad things. And so God says, yeah, you know what? I got nothing more to do with you. Thank you very much. And Saul doesn't like that answer. So he says, huh. Maybe I could go to like some witch. I know there's one in Endor, and maybe she can conjure me up somebody that can get me back in God's good graces. He tries to do an end run. And so he goes to this witch in Endor, and she says, what do you want from me, dude? Because he disguises himself, so she doesn't know that he's King Saul, so she calls him dude. She says, so what do you want from me, dude? And dude says oh, I'm so glad you didn't notice I was the king Yes, I would like you to conjure up for me the now deceased Prophet and she still doesn't know he's a king Samuel and she still doesn't know he's a king at this point, right? But she says why would you want me to do that? Because the king has made conjuring up spirits and do all this necromancy stuff illegal You want me to be killed? Why she's worried about that, she could just conjure herself up, it seems to me. But anyway, that's an aside. And so he says, no, no, trust me, it's okay, you can do this. And so she says, okay, so what do you want me to do? And so here's what I'm gonna pick up. This is verse 11 of 1 Samuel chapter 28, and I'm reading, I think this is the NET translation. I just picked a random translation. Actually, the NET's an okay translation. It's not one of the bad ones. It's a pretty decent one. And they have excellent footnotes. They have some of the best footnotes of any Bible out there. I will say that. Anyway, so this woman replied, who is it that I should bring up for you, dude? You sure about that translation? And so the dude said, bring up for me Samuel. Then it says here, when the woman saw Samuel, she cried out loudly. So she's really surprised. She actually conjured him up. What kind of witch is this? She's not a very self-confident witch. And she says to Saul, why have you deceived me? You are Saul! Now, how she goes from not knowing it's Saul, to knowing it's Saul, is left to the imagination here. So, oh, okay, what's your theory? Let's get to the rest of it. Okay, so the king said, you're enjoying story time? So, the king then says, drag queen story time, so I'm all for this. So, it's the king now, so he's not a dude anymore. So, the king said to her, don't be afraid, But what have you seen? And the woman replied to Saul, I have seen a divine being coming up from the ground. And he said to her, what about his appearance? I think the word is Elohim there in the Old Testament. Because it's usually translated as God's spirit. So I get a better translation, but let me try, you know, let me go to one that's gonna be a little more word-for-word NASB that was verse what 11 12 13, where was I? Yeah, let me see what it says here Let me see what the footnote says because it says the NAB says divine being or God is the footnote and So the word there is Elohim? Yeah, the word is Elohim. I just did a word search on that word. It is Elohim in the Masoretic. Okay, but clearly it's not meant to be God, God. Elohim is a generic word or name for a God. It could be any spirit. So lowercase g. These angels are Elohim. Yeah, lowercase g in this case. That's why I think some of these translations went with divine being to avoid the confusion because they put the word God there. I think, boy, we all... So now I'm in the NASB 95. Mixing and matching translations. An old man is coming up and he's wrapped with a robe and Saul knew it was Samuel and he bowed with his face to the ground and did homage. Now it's curious, I'll go back to another translation. You have the King James up? It says he bowed himself. Does it say that he knew it was, or how does it say that part? It's all perceived that it was. Ah, yeah, okay. I think that's a better translation probably, actually. He didn't know anything for sure. How could he know? I got to look at the Hebrew there and look at the Septuagint as well and see. The author knows. Well, the author knows, but this is narrative describing, I don't know. He's realizing or making a really good guess or whatever. Anyway, so it goes on from there and the entity that we're led to believe is Samuel. It says, and Samuel said to Saul, why have you disturbed me by bringing me up? And Saul answered, I'm greatly distressed, blah, blah, blah. And Samuel says, yeah, but God told you to get out of town, so get out of town. His end round around God's will doesn't work. So he tries to conjure up Saul. So, do you think this is actually Saul? Do you think it's actually the spirit of God? I'm sorry, Samuel. But do you think it's actually Samuel? Do you think it is? Maybe Elohim is God and it's God taking on the appearance of Samuel to say, I already told you once, I'm not telling you again. I'm done with you. Or is it a demonic spirit? Because this is the Black Arts, right? This is a witch. This is the occult. This is... Until someone presents other evidence, I can't really see it as anyone other than Samuel. Okay, and you're in agreement? So I think the Bible calls him Samuel. It doesn't just say he looked like Samuel. It says, and Samuel said, and the Bible is inspired. So, so it says, and Samuel said not, and the being said, or, and the spirit said that they all thought was Samuel. It says, and Samuel said. So I think it's pretty clear that Samuel actually was there, whether he was there in body, in spirit, somehow, whatever. But it doesn't say Samuel was saying this. Well, it said he was an Elohim, so it wasn't his body. It was him in spirit. Right. But he, yeah, so he looked like a person though, so. You can tell it was him, right? So now the other question though that comes up is first of all, how is that possible? Did she bring him up? Did god just send him to use this as an exam as a as a Excuse to talk to someone again or whatever because and then if she if she didn't do it she Yeah, she was shocked to find out that she cries out I mean, I I think a a really good translation seriously would be like she screamed like she's like she comes on glued But what made her scream though? See, I think that it worked. Yeah, you know, I don't I don't think so. What do you think it is? I think what made her scream was she realized now because she's she was in the spirit world, which she wasn't actively in the spirit world when he first came to her. So she didn't know he was the king. She was shocked to find out he was a king. She knew because she got herself opened up spiritually and got some kind of notice that this is salt. She wouldn't, how else would she know that this is Saul? She's like, oh, you're Saul, you deceived me. I had nothing to do with Sam unless God told her that this is Saul. I don't think necromancers communed with the dead. I would say that they communed with demonic, which is either she was a huckster and a fraud, or she was communicating with demons. And that would be one of the arguments. I don't think she was regularly, I don't think she was communicating with the dead. Why are we commanded not to commune with the dead if it's not possible? No, no, no, I'm not saying it's not possible I'm saying there wouldn't be a command not to commune with the dead if it wasn't if it was possible. It wasn't possible Right, so it's possible to commune with the dead. Correct as evidenced in this passage. Well, so then why do you say necromancers can't or don't ever? Well now wait a minute. Maybe my position isn't that they don't do it ever I think the majority of time they're communicating with Is it a clear to talk to the dead or is it that or is it a Or is it a sin to try to talk to the dead? And I'm not asking if he just says, don't talk to the dead. It doesn't say what you're trying to do. Well, necromancy, I'm not positive. It's been a while since I've been to seminary. You're a seminary student. I mean, you might be fresher. I've come across necromancy. Is necromancy actually successfully conjuring the dead? Or is necromancy the dark art of attempting to? It would be the second option. So it doesn't have to be successful. So I'm not sure that. I'm 100% sure that the Bible would say that it's possible. So my opinion would be even if it isn't possible to talk to the dead, which I think you could talk to the dead as evidenced by this passage, but normally when you call upon the dead, you're calling upon demonic forces. Whatever ends up talking to you, if something really ends up talking to you and it's not a trick or an illusion, then it would be a demon, most likely. And in fact that demon may be able to show you things or proofs or evidences that he is whoever you're trying to talk to Potentially because he was there at the time and knew or inhabited that person also. He's a powerful demon who has knowledge Yeah, so if it is Samuel and by the way, I'm now somewhat ambivalent by the way for the I'm not saying it's that it's definitely Samuel and I'm not saying it's definitely not Samuel I'm open to the possibility that it's not Samuel because of these other difficulties that I have a hard time screwing my head. It's a sin to engage in necromancy. And here we have a supposed successful necromancy empowered by... Of a godly person. Yeah, and that is sanctioned by God because this apparition Actually gives a message from God well regardless of your opinion so long as you accept That's a message from God then isn't that God approving of whatever's? I would say if you want to take the position that it wasn't actually Samuel it was some demon It may not have been a message particularly from God either then maybe can say whatever you want. Oh, you're gonna die today. Oh Just like all those false prophets for Ahab said, well, you're going to die today, or you're not going to die today, or whatever. They can get messages that are purporting to be from God and not really from God. The demon claims God as his Lord over and over again, though. If Samuel is a demon that's impersonating Samuel, he's the Lord, the Lord. It's over and over again in his message. Yeah, but that's also those prophets of Ahab were saying that, too. The Lord God would do this. Adonai Yahweh is going to deliver into your hand. They're saying that. They're speaking as if they're talking about God. I have more to say about Samuel. So I have my doubts. Believing as I do that this was Samuel, I have my doubts that she actually brought him up. I think if she had the power to bring anybody up, it wouldn't be somebody from heaven. It'd be somebody from hell. Most likely it would need to be a real person to be a demon. So I think I agree with you that that would be one reason why she was surprised. I think whenever happened happened, she gained some additional knowledge because she now knows this is Saul and she's confident this is Saul. Why would she know this is Saul based on seeing Samuel? Because Samuel comes up. That doesn't tell her Saul. It just tells them, well, okay, God's involved now. There's something really weird going on. But that doesn't tell her who Saul is. So the only way is, is she got some kind of revelation by a demon or by God, you know, telling her that this is Saul. So that's why she was surprised. Or somehow Saul, that's not explained in the narrative, gave himself away. Maybe he gasped in a way that she recognizes, but we don't really know. The Bible, particularly in the Old Testament narratives, there's a lot of biblical shorthand. You know, there's a story that describes an hours-long scene in these two verses. And it's like, okay, we got to figure an awful lot of stuff out of those two verses. So a lot of stuff is biblical shorthand. So I'm not 100% sure there. If this is an act of God and it's God saying, I'm just going to raise up Samuel's spirit to give this last prophecy to Saul. I don't think you can say that that's a sin or even necromancy at all, because isn't God going to raise all of us? Are we going to all be speaking to the dead at some point? This is before that, and it seems to go against what… And he says to her, why have you disquieted me by bringing me up? As if she's the one doing it. Through Samuel? Yeah, Samuel says that. Why have you disquieted me by bringing me up? That is the difficulty with it. And I'm not saying it's the strongest argument against it. Actually, no, he says that to Saul, right? Samuel says that to Saul. Yeah, he talks to Saul, which would be consistent with the idea that he's being brought up by God and not necessarily by this witch. And if the idea is that Samuel, or this entity that we're likely to believe is probably or maybe Samuel, if he's coming to warn Saul off of his bad ways or to bring a message from God and say, it seems to be hard to 100% make that jive with Luke. Jesus says that the dead aren't gonna come back and warn. I think it's even stronger than that. Like the dead, they can't come back and warn the living. So this would seem to go against that. So you have to harmonize that somehow. I will say the strongest argument in favor of, it is Samuel, is the text says, Samuel said, Saul saw Samuel, like it says his name and that's in the narrative parts. And it seems like, okay, the narrator, and if this is God's word, then God's a narrator. There's a human author too, I get that. But is it, I'm not, in light of all the other, And I've only mentioned a couple, there's more. The other issues that come up, is it possible that this is some sort of a... literary device in the narrative. And it's not, we're supposed to understand that it's not actually Samuel because it couldn't actually be Samuel for all these reasons. And so it's a literary device. Is that possible? I don't know. That's why I'm ambivalent. It would seem to, at least to my looking at it, if the inspired writer who can't lie, it's completely infallible, says it's Samuel. It would take a lot of extra context for me to say, well, it's not actually Samuel. Because at that point, isn't it lying to you if it says it's Samuel saying these things? Isn't it publishing false information? Samuel said this meant to say if it's a monic entity It would automatically have to be it like me because it could be if it is a literary and I'm not saying it is I'm just I'm There's so many. This is a very The passage isn't complex, but the implications of the passage are incredibly complex And so trying to make all of that fit the biblical broader biblical teachings is challenging. So the A solution to it not being a lie would be the perspective from which the story is being told. as those who are in the room, we're seeing and reacting, it's helping us, bringing us into the moment. That's possible. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but I'm open to that possibility. The other big thing that I hear people saying against it being Samuel is where he's coming from. He's not coming back from heaven, he's coming out of the earth. He's coming up instead of down. And people will say, well, he's not coming from heaven, so he must, it must be some kind of demonic spirit, which- But he doesn't have his body in heaven anyway. Correct. And it's just a spirit. It's not Samuel's body. Heaven is another dimension likely that doesn't necessarily have a lot of bearing physically to directions here. And also there's a whole theology and doctrine about whether the dead were actually in heaven or whether they were in Hades until Christ. Correct. And I would be one of those who would say that there was a location of paradise within the heart of the earth. in a separate compartment in Hades. And that was actually a physical place in the center of the earth. In fact, not a physical place, but a spiritual place where spirits go. In fact, I think there's an interesting comment about the bottomless pit. When it talks about a bottomless pit, where is a good place to have a bottomless pit? The center of the earth, because there is no bottom. It's only top. Because every direction is up. So if you're in the center of the earth, that would technically be a bottomless pit. And there's psalms that talk about people going into the deepest part of the earth when they die. Like there's different compartments of this paradise area. And this would go off into eschatology, so I may be not expounding on this too much. So there is another part about the same opacity zone. It's first Samuel 15 after Saul disobeyed God for the third or fourth or tenth time or whatever it was Samuel said you know he kills Agag and then he says then Samuel went to Ramah and Saul went up to his house and Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death Nevertheless Samuel mourned for Saul and the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel. That's a whole nother topic Why is the Lord repenting of things? You know, if God doesn't change and God doesn't change his mind, you know, why is God change his mind here change his mind for killing Isaiah and and all this In the book of Isaiah, okay, that's actually that might be one talk. Yeah people have that question. Well, why is God? Anthropomorphic language But God repents, maybe would be a good phrase to include in that note, just so we remember what specifically. So, that verse is interesting. Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death. Well, whose death? Well, probably Saul's though, right? This was the day of Saul's death when he saw him again. So if that's true, if that's what it means, until the day of Saul's death, that implies it really was Samuel that came to see him again. Or maybe it just means that for the rest of his life he never saw him again. So is that what it means? And I think that the gist of the narrative here in this broader story is that God's done with Saul. I have nothing more to do with you. You can cast lots if you want. Use Irma Thurman. Is that the actress or something? You can try to use an actress. You can try to go to the prophets. You can try to do whatever. Elijah was saying this may actually be an actress, somebody who pretends to be dead and doesn't actually do this. But anyway, the point is, I'm going to have nothing to do with you. And then all of a sudden, he's going to have something to do with him by having Samuel. That would be a reason to scratch your head. That's interesting. Well, God says also, In an example, in a passage about prayer, he says that you should keep praying because of the woman that kept asking the judge, even if the judge was unrighteous, eventually he listened to her. She kept asking him. And it is just a message that said, hey, you messed up all that time ago. I'm not changing my mind. I'm still going to judge you and it's going to be tomorrow, basically. Now, the narrator is telling us that, you know, they saw Samuel, Samuel said whatever, but the words that come out of the mouth of the characters in the story, they never actually say that they saw Samuel. Well, Saul perceived Samuel. Well, you're right, the narrator. Yeah, because he said, well, you're giving the impression that Saul doesn't see him at all, because he has to ask the old lady. So old lady, who do you see? He does commune with this entity. And then the lady says, it's an old dude wearing a robe. She doesn't say it's Samuel. No, but the narrator says it was Samuel, because it says, then Samuel said. Exactly. No, the narrator is. That's the strongest evidence for saying it really was Samuel, because it says, and Samuel said. And that was the point before, that is by far the strongest argument is the narrator is saying that, but then there's all these ancillary issues that are like really complex. Like, holy cow, how do we make sense of all this? I'm open to the possible. I don't think I've ever taught officially or preached on this passage, but boy, this would take a lot of study time to get ready for it and make sure I handled it well. But just the doctrine of Hades, where is the spirit of Samuel coming from? That would take a long time to discuss, because that will be my opinion of what the first resurrection is, is the Old Testament saints being released from this area of paradise in the heart of the earth up into heaven. In fact, though, what happened when the curtain was torn was people came out of the graves and walked around on the earth too. It wasn't like they just went to heaven then. So how do you deal with that too? And how many of them? It says many bodies of the saints. But only the saved ones then, I assume. Well, I would say it's a different resurrection at that point. I would say that the... That is a miracle that happened as he died, but when he got resurrected, then that's when... Christ is the first fruits of that particular resurrection harvest. So, we've got just a few minutes left, so let me see if this is a decent synopsis and you can react to the synopsis quickly if I miss something or get something way wrong. I think the overwhelming consensus among Christians, teachers, scholars, what have you, is that it is Samuel, but there is a I don't know if it's a significant minority, but there is a noteworthy minority that would say, no, it's not Samuel. And I think that both opinions, from my perspective, I think they both can be respected. Even if you say, yeah, it's probably Samuel. I'm not going to call the person who thinks it wasn't Samuel a heretic. I don't think I would go that far. I think we can say that. I think we can all agree necromancy bad. Absolutely. So we're saying that. And no matter how we're saying, whether it is Samuel, isn't Samuel, I was being playful before, but seriously, Paul, Saul is trying to do an end round. He's trying to get his own way after God said, no, it's not going to happen. And here you see, you can't end round God. If God says that's it, that's it. You can try everything. You can try all the dark magic you want. It's not going to work. So those are some things that are true, regardless of whether it's actually Samuel or not. And the other questions that are related to it, I think, are really cool, interesting, fun, deep dive kinds of questions. If anything, we've talked about this hodgepodge, kind of a mess of a show, because there's so many things going on. Pick one. and study it, examine it, and see if you can learn and learn other things about the Bible in the process. So that's the things I think are takeaways from this episode. But absolutely. Any, any strong disagreements? You have like 30 seconds if you want to make a strong disagreement. I think you about covered it. All right. Well, then we're going to call it, we're going to call it a day. Look at that, we've got plenty of time for exit music and everything. Last couple of weeks, I think we didn't really have any exit music. I was so late on time. Elijah Dirksen, thank you so much for taking time from your seminary studies to join us. Daniel Rasby, thank you. Thank you for listening to us on the Faith Debate here on Newsradio 930 WFMD. You can find us at wfmd.com and householdoffaithinchrist.com. We'll be back to continue our dialogue on some other matter next week, 167 and a half hours from right now. Till then, God bless. All right. Those are some good shows, I think. Yeah. All right. The streams are going long enough, probably. Somebody's watching at this exact moment. I don't know who you are, but God bless you. If you have any questions or comments on what we talked about, put them in the comments section. I always try to respond to, well, if you swear at me, I may or may not respond. But anyway, until next time, God bless.