The Old Testament and Asian contexts (w/ Dr. Jerry Hwang)

[@tookie36]

Love the perspective of someone with such a cross cultural background. Really helps illuminate the gospel

[@DiscipleDojo]

@@tookie36 it really does!

[@Ldgreggbell]

I grew up as a British person in Malaysia. I spent 12 years there, and the SE Asian culture certainly influenced me greatly The honour-shame frame of Christianity made it more relatable for me that the guilt aspect.

[@BrendaBoykin-qz5dj]

Thank you, JM and Dr. Hwang🌹⭐🔥⭐🌹

[@angelamc2923]

"To be a better interpreter, you need to become a deeper person." I love it! I have found it to be true as I get older.

[@dioncupido2824]

Absolutely loved the talk

[@MM-jf1me]

This was a fascinating interview! I was struck so many times with thoughts and questions y'all brought to mind that I kinda wish I'd been taking notes. 😅 I'll have to listen to this one again.

[@langhampublishing]

Thank you for this insightful conversation and for bringing up such important topics!

[@lovemuffin4521]

it make me feel that the western culture pride is in the way of the kingdom

[@RealMusicHype]

00:26 Good stuff..

[@CozyCruiserr]

Is there an audiobook?

[@DiscipleDojo]

@@CozyCruiserr not that I know of. Reach out to Langham and let them know you want one!

[@ShaneZettelmier]

I think things like this are important, like a lot of the Levitical law stuff is kind of making it clear not to do things and those things are directly related to kind of what is going on. Like in Levitical dietary law, you’re not supposed to eat dairy with meat I believe it is and people always try to figure out why you can’t eat dairy with meat if that some sort of health issue, but it’s because the pagans used to perform rituals and would eat the dairy with the meat, some sort of fertility ritual and the people living there during that day would’ve understood that context but years later, we don’t know that because we don’t have a bunch of people running around eating cheeseburgers trying to get pregnant. Even with Sodom and Gomorrah, a lot of Christians think that God just destroyed that area because of sodomy. The act was named after the place, but there was a whole lot more going on there than just sodomy, but even LGBT activist type groups or run around attacking Christianity saying that it’s intolerant of or hateful against homosexuality, but God didn’t just wipe out side of me because there were some gay dudes. There wiped it out because they were raping and killing and murdering their own children and committing every kind of sin and they were threat to everyone around them. But I think this is a big part of what’s missing in a lot of Ible teaching whether it be in a church or online, a lot of times people have no idea what this contact is or why things are happening. They just read it and quickly breeze through it and they don’t understand why.

[@albusai]

doesn't say dairy with meat 🍖.

[@brittybee6615]

Wow, yeah, it really would make a lot more sense to take “don’t boil a kid goat in it’s mother’s milk” to mean “don’t do weird fertility rituals” rather than “don’t have cheeseburgers.” As far as I’ve been told, some of those rabbinic laws were meant, not to “add to the Law,” per se, but to be an additional buffer against even coming close to breaking Mosaic laws. Seems like some of them really miss the point, though.

[@ShaneZettelmier]

I think you’re right on looking at other texts when you look at the differences and the similarities. I don’t know why this surprises people. I commented similarly on another video, but God is the creator. He’s reality and Abraham was not the first person he ever talked to, he talked to Adam. He talked to others eventually to Noah. Everything got wiped out in the flood and everybody on this planet basically comes from Noah’s family so of course they’re going to have a common sense of knowledge of the universe and its creation and all of that up to that point maybe not laid out as definitively as Genesis, but the idea that God never spoke to humans until our scriptures were written down doesn’t even make sense even in our scriptures that says he talked to Adam and he walked with them and there’s all kinds of interaction with Job with inter and Noah, so there was a basic knowledge of God and creation out there before our scriptures got written down for us And it’s not like these people came from another planet and just magically appeared with no knowledge of anything they were created by God also and only makes sense that their stories would be similar if they weren’t then they would be total fiction, but if God creates the heaven in the Earth And talk to his creation and interact with them and they have some knowledge of what’s going on and they pass that down to their children and their children and their children and somebody starts writing it down in another culture. Why would you not assume that there would be similarities. From the presumption that these other are absolute fiction but these are other people trying to describe historical events and creation the way they understood it, and it may not be dictated through the Holy Spirit to be recorded and brought to the world as the Scriptures. These people still had knowledge of their creation to some extent and similarities and their Stories, logical to me. If you asked Noah, where we came from, he didn’t have scriptures. He didn’t know Moses. He didn’t have the old Testament to read from, but there was some knowledge of it, and I’m sure people talked about these things and we all came from Noah’s family no matter where we live on this planet , so the idea that if people started writing down historical events that they would be similar just seems logical. Of course they’re going to be similarities and a lot of these stories are gonna be retold from generation to generation and get some things wrong but you see things like the flood in a lot of different ancient writing, that doesn’t mean the Bible stole that event because somebody else wrote it down first they’re both writing about the same thing if there’s a baseball game on TV and the Yankees win and Channel 5 news and channel 8 news say the same thing they’re not stealing from each other both reporting on the same events another cultures talk about a great flood. It’s not that Genesis ripped this off from them. It’s describing the great flood and these other people are talking about the great flood also because it happened. It’s only gonna be plagiarized if it’s something that never happened and something that was made up out of nothing. If I wrote the fictional story and you wrote a fictional story that was almost identical there’s a logical premise that you plagiarized from it that you somehow read or heard my story and wrote your story with that as an influence, but you and I both write a story about a historical event can be completely independent of each other because the event took place. Our story of Genesis and creation is just what God is. It’s not a religion. He created this universe. It’s how it was created. This is reality. It’s not a story that somebody’s plagiarizing from somebody else or back-and-forth, this is Reality, this is how the world was created and so another cultures even if they’ve never read the Bible they’re going to have some stories or something about how the world was created and it may not be accurate and it may be accurate, but it’s only logical to assume that they’re gonna have some of these same events in them. And like when you read Buddhism, it is great wisdom maybe not because it came from God but because it’s just how things are if I say bad thing for you punch your grandmother in the face with a rock that doesn’t necessarily have to come from God to make it true. This is just common sense. This is reality. These are things we learn and observe in life, which is much of what Buddhism is. There’s a lot of wisdom there and a lot of it very similar to Christianity because it’s just Reality, but that doesn’t mean plagiarized from the other or the other. Sometimes I think the people that feel this way that think one religion had to copy from another are coming at it with a predisposition that it’s all fake and not based on reality therefore, if there are similarities, one had to steal it from the other, but the creation story and God are the same. God created all of us so we’re from Asia or America or New Zealand, we’re all created by the same God we all even narrow that down through Noah’s family and Hole tower of Babel and adding Lange languages and confusion play into that, but we still came from the same place we still were all created in the same world under the same circumstances so Seeing similarities between ancient cultures isn’t something that should surprise people at all and if I read something from a writing about Gil or Hammurabi or Bruce Lee or whatever, and I see similarities why would I automatically assume that there has to be a plagiarized or one is copying the other maybe they’re all just talking about reality And history and what happened in theory and I could be wrong here, but I’m guessing the story of Job probably took place before Genesis was written and before the law and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and all of that was written, but in the story of Joe he talks about things that are right and wrong that are rules. God laid down for us, and got interacted with people why do we assume that these other cultures that were all people that came down from Noah? Wouldn’t know that we know our bible these are our cousins and family one time I believe it was eight people on the planet with a basic shared knowledge of everything that happened from creation to the end of the flood, and these people went out and populated the world why do we assume that there must be some complete, total separation that we don’t know the same things it’s not like we just walked around as caveman, kicking rocks and then one day God came along and told somebody to write down Genesis and met Abraham and human being started recording knowledge. Even Adam and Eve had basic rules, don’t eat of this tree. God spoke to them he gave them rules. He explained things to them before our scriptures were written down so we assume that descendents would have no knowledge whatsoever of Christian principles or God‘s principles and God‘s word because that’s just reality it’s not a religion. It’s not something somebody manufactured made up. It is universe created it reality. And even man-made religions in any culture are still gonna be made from people who grew up hearing about their creation to some extent whether it’s accurate or not, but there should always be similarities if there aren’t indication that complete. If there’s an account of history that doesn’t have the flood in it. You can pretty much guarantee that some dude made it up, it wasn’t much in reality because the similarity should exist in every culture because we all came from the same place

[@suzannedebusschere1607]

You have some good points. I think it would be worth your time to work on your writing skills, especially on grouping your thoughts into paragraphs, and stating things succinctly. I think you have things to say that will benefit people if you develop the skill of communicating your ideas more clearly.

[@ShaneZettelmier]

I have a question for you guys based on what was talked about it about one hour and 26 minutes. Jerry was talking about the wizards of the pharaohs and their works or when they got a staff and threw it down and made it turn into a snake and some frogs and stuff they were sort of challenging Moses and God. Jerry was talking about other things, and it almost sounded like he was inferring that there were other gods with true power , and almost like we would be remiss to assume that God was unique like there weren’t other powerful gods with real power, but God is the creator. He has the power. Why would he make other gods? I might be misunderstanding this, but it almost sounded like he was saying that, these actions weren’t tricks or illusion that they were actually manifestations of power from other gods. It’s always been my understanding that it was God a true God, who is Yahweh, the father of the son in the spirit and that that was it he created this earth and other gods were false. They were man-made depictions, things like wizardry or magic or basically alchemy or illusion. It almost sounds like he saying, or maybe he believes that there are other gods out there that God is just the greatest of all those other gods, but he’s the creator of the universe if there were other gods out there, he would have to have created them, which seems inconsistent and kind of set off a warning in my spirit. Is he saying that there are other gods out there with some sort of divine powers that he just believes God is the most powerful of all those other real gods? This doesn’t make sense to me?? 🤔 if not, can you elaborate a little bit further clarify what he was saying?

[@DiscipleDojo]

I believe his point was that there actually is such a thing as spiritual powers (false gods, demons, etc.) and while God is sovereign Creator and the only one to be worshipped, He is not the only spiritual entity that exists. So extreme-accommodationists will sometimes rationalize or "demythologize" Scripture to the point of denying the existence of all "gods" entirely. But Scripture itself never does this. Even Paul can say that *idols* are nothing...but the *spiritual entities being worshipped through them* are indeed demonic. Yet on the other hand, we don't need to go as far as the extreme "divine council" enthusiasts sometimes do in their attempt at hammering out the various origins or hierarchies of such spiritual beings.

[@Elizabeth-h5m]

We all trace back to Noah who taught his common values to his sond.

[@ShaneZettelmier]

I think the question on whether allah and God are the same PERSON/GOD we are all referring to what these names mean. We have a bunch of different names from God and those names mean the same thing. Yahweh is his name the God of Abraham we can also call him Jehovah Rapha, which I believe means the God that heals these aren’t names. These are descriptions or names that describe things he does. I believe the errors in the question Mohammed, who is responsible for what we call Islam made it very clear that the God referenced in Islam is supposed to be the god of Abraham, it’s my understanding of that the lights is where Islam basically comes from where that ideological belief system that they believe because Ishmael was born first that he was the fulfillment of God‘s promise And Jews, no because God said specifically had to be Sarah Isaac, then Jacob to be chosen to bring his word and salvation/Messiah to the world. It’s my understanding that Mohammed‘s belief was that no Ishmael was born before Isaac therefore they should be God chosen people. So if we hold them to his word at that, technically he’s claiming that he’s worshiping the same God, which is the God of Abraham Yahweh. Should be the description and what Islam has told us about this God they claim as the God of Abraham is accurate or not, and that’s where they fallacy is, Islam is flawed contradicts itself, Muhammad, that the Bible was God‘s word and that he was a profit for the Arab people, with the problem existed. He redefines characters of Jesus and Yahweh and turns them into something else. So the Islamic description of God is not consistent, the god of Abraham is clearly defined and Mohammed tries to redefined. It is something else claiming it is that God. So the claim is that it is the God of Abraham and that Muslim say we have the same God that’s what they’re talking about but Mohammed also said he thought he was deceived by Demons and all this other stuff so I think you might be onto something there because his description of the God of Abraham is inconsistent with everybody else’s description of the God of Abraham and has a completely different character so maybe that’s what he meant to write down, but maybe he was getting his influence From someone the Holy Spirit or the god of Abraham, but was telling him he was and deceiving him as he questioned himself, or maybe he just made the whole thing up redefining the God of Abraham to fit his own man-made religion, either way Islam contradicts itself. It says that the Bible is the errant infallible word of God And proclaim that Jesus will come again to judge the living in the dead and at the same time says Allah is the only one who can judge, which logically is saying that to Jesus, therefore must be God or Allah within the Islamic context, but then they try to change them into a non-God figure just a profit And that’s kind of weird it all falls apart amongst many other things. It’s contradictory with itself all the only one to judge and Jesus is going to come back to judge then Jesus must be a law within Islamic logic they say he’s just a profit and not God they’ll say you never claim to be God which I’m not sure Muhammad even said that, Mohammed recognized the Scriptures has the infallible word of God and modern Islam just says oh somebody just wrote that and made it up and it’s inaccurate therefore you got trust Mohammed but Mohammed said it’s infallible and the Bible we’re reading is the same Mohammed had access to claims all this about so this idea that It’s all been screwed up. Doesn’t make any sense. You could say that the translations were messed up, but we can still go back to the old text and break everything down and read the Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic so that is the same infallible word of God that Mohammed was speaking of so for Muslim to say that the Bible is corrupted by man, sorry that goes against the teachings of your profit who everything comes through Mohammed claims is authority, saying that a law gave him this word there was nobody else involved so by Muslim logic what Mohamad says is what God says because the law said so and they justify a laws authority because Mohammed said so so actuality you can’t deny Mohammed and what he says because you’re justifying law through what Mohammed says he prophesied. So you can’t separate the two if you do, you have a broken religion, if you’re going to disregard what Muhammad said then you’re making up your own religion because what Muhammad said is Islam if you say Islam is something different than that something you made up on your own. We don’t know where it went wrong. We don’t know if when Mohammed said he was or thought he was being lied to by demons, maybe that’s where he got the whole story from demons who made it up and it’s just demonic falsehood given to Mohammed or maybe he was trying to worship the god of Abraham, but Created a theology and it’s just a flawed theological construct or man-made religion trying to worship the God of Abraham, but is flawed in its theology and broken therefore doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of scripture end that means a lot of it is invalid if any of it is valid at all. So only Muhammad can really answer the question whether it’s the same God claims it is the God of Abraham so that the claim is there worshiping Yahweh, the god of Abraham and recognize that but it’s teaching contradict itself and her teaching characteristics in Allah, that are not consistent with characteristics of Yahweh, the God of Abraham and they disregard God zone words when he said it would be Sarah, and her son would be named Isaac and his son would be named Jacob and that’s where his chosen people would come from and that’s not me would be like the rest of us and one of the many forms of gentiles and it is what it is. Islam teaches different than, it’s creating a flaw because Mohammed said that that was the infallible word of God and now Islam saying something contradictory to that so Mohammed screwed up or whoever wrote down the Islamic religion screwed up what Mohammed said and there’s a fallacy somewhere people could argue endlessly about where it came from but the only thing that’s consistent is there is a fallacy and contradiction there Therefore it doesn’t stand up to the requirements of what should be considered scripture. So the question is is the Allah scripted in Islamic doctrine the God of Abraham, and the question of that is no it is inconsistent with the god of Abraham and contradicts within its own writings therefore, one way or the other has to be wrong. You could answer that yes because Mohammed claimed it was the god of Abraham, but you could also say no because his depiction of the teachings in Islam are inconsistent with a character teachings and reality of Yahweh and our universe so you can say the answer is no answer either no or yes, but they got it wrong clearly. And the fact that Mohammed question himself and said he may have been possessed and confused by demons I think is probably something that they should consider potentially accurate because that would make more sense when you understand the flaws and contradictions within that doctrine. If I was sitting down with a group of the illusions and scholars discussing this, I think the best way to categorize it would be too, have a capitalized version of allah and a non-capitalized version of a law just like we have a capitalized and non-capitalized version of god. There are polytheistic gods, but they are not Yahweh or the capitalized God. Man-made gods would be a lowercased God a category Asian of what people claimed to be some sort of divine Godlike entity. Using the word in Arabic law is just a translation meaning the same as the English translation word God in lowercase but if it’s used as a pronoun in the capitalized version, your referencing Yahweh and that doctrines description of that is in accurate whether it was meant to be or not, that’s what we can’t define the word in the lowercase would be the same as a Hindu God or some South American tree, monkey God, or something that people called a god but not a name just a position like you would say manager or owner or King. The word Allah means god lowercase, but sometimes they use it as a pronoun claiming it is Yahweh the god of Abraham, but their description of him within their doctrine isn’t consistent with the characteristics and nature of the god of Abraham. Now you could argue the same with modern Judaism that denies the trinity, but Jesus was a Jew everything he said was Jewish. He was the fulfillment of Jewish law. He was the word and salvation brought to the world. He is the Jewish Messiah. Jews, who cut out text of the Trinity and Jesus has God, and don’t recognize her Messiah are creating something that is not the word of God or there are misinterpreting it to the point where it becomes something different. When we talk about Judaism as what Jesus grew up with that is very different than the Talde versions and Rabbinic Judaism From 500ad. This is where a lot of discussions go wrong when people say that the Jewish god is a monotheistic God, no he isn’t. It is the triune God,

[@ShaneZettelmier]

the Old Testament Not talking about a monotheistic God, rabbinic Judaism is , but the mistake is thinking that Jesus was raised on modern interpretations of Judaism. He wasn’t. He was raised on the word of God and the scripture is the Tanakh or what we would call the old testament. It is complete and he is the Messiah of God’s word or Old Testament Judaism. So other people making up a different story later whether they call themselves Jewish or Muslim or Hare Krishna or atheist or or anything else is not the same thing. And that’s where a lot of people go wrong studying this is they say Judaism believes in monotheistic God, no, it doesn’t. A lot of people call themselves Jew didn’t recognize their Messiah and kind of made up their own thing they say that, but that is an inaccurate statement. So in that sense now there’s a third option, which did Muhammad believe in the true Yahweh, the triune God that the Tanakh and the new Testament spoke of or did he make up his own mono fiesta God or did he believe in a misrepresented man-made version of Judaism that re-created God into a monotheistic God that wasn’t consistent with the truth of Yahweh. All possibilities the doctor of Islam is so inconsistent that it doesn’t matter, even if they are talking about Yahweh. They got so much of it wrong that we honestly shouldn’t be paying attention to it other than just understanding what Muslims might think which again from their own doctrine is really distinguishable it depends on how they interpret and which parts they believe or don’t believe, its own doctrine it is inconsistent and either way would not be an accurate depiction of Yahweh, even if it was intended to be from the beginning. The Islamic depiction of God is a monotheistic God and like modern Ruben or Talmudic groups who don’t recognize their Messiah and also don’t recognize Trinity. They have created their own monotheistic. God they may have been based on God, but changed it or messed it up might be a more accurate description, but Old Testament Judaism is still believing in a triune God modern for protections say no it’s a monotheistic God, but Jesus was clear on it and he was a Jew. Paul was one of the most educated jews of the day, who knew their doctrine inside out, and was an esteemed Jew and scholar and Christianity is not a different religion than that Jesus is the fulfillment of that that’s what they were chosen for was to bring God‘s word in the Messiah to the world and there’s still some of that to play out that covenant didn’t go away it just went into the part where the Messiah made his first coming the followers of the first covenant. The descendants of Jacob are still going to play a part in the second coming as well all the same God, the father of the son and the spirit some of the Jews just didn’t recognize their own Messiah, and recreated their own version of a religion with a monotheistic God ignoring the trinity in most cases and that’s probably why Islam is a monotheistic God because Mohammed basically plagiarized their version of Judaism. I think, scholars or theologians are people discussing this and investigating, and considering it in general often make a mistake of thinking that teachings are consistent with titles. People will say things like well. The Jewish people say when the Jewish people say all kinds of different stuff some of it completely crazy some of it absolutely right on Jesus was a Jewish people what he said was very accurate and consistent with the nature And word of God in the Old Testament Jewish doctrine, Matthew and Paul were Jews, and you hear modern day people like Rabbi, Schooley, and people like that who just kind of make up whatever they want so if you say Jew saying repeat something, he said you’re talking about two absolute opposites and completely different things And maybe in the middle with Christianity you can say what Christians believe some people will throw Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness in there and that is not Christianity that is not the teachings of Jesus Christ but they called themselves Christians and Islam the same there are a bunch of different forms of Islam taught in different groups Teaching different things so you can’t say Christian say this or Jews say this or Muslim say this because they say all different kinds of things that’s why we have to get specific and go to the doctrine not somebody’s loose interpretation of it and if we want the answers, we have to do the research ourselves. I was a Christian before I ever read Islam so you could say I’m biased or whatever but as I started looking, I just saw a bunch of contradictions within itself which makes it an invalid doctrine and then their depictions of law are not consistent with the reality of God And then you see the work or actions of Muhammad and it becomes clear that has nothing to do with God or his teachings but that’s how you have to go about it. You can’t just go by what Muslim say because you can get 1 million different answers and you can get that from Christians or Jews as well because the sad part is most people really don’t study their own doctrine. I would say the vast majority of Christian I’ve known over decades probably never read most of the old testament. They’ve sat and heard a few stories in church here and there, but I doubt even more than five or 10% of people themselves Christians have actually sat down and read through, every single name in the genealogies and the list of names in the Old Testament books and I could understand it. I had to force myself to read every word because I wanted to have read every word in the Bible and not have missed anything but a bunch of times I tried and just couldn’t do it because honestly, it’s kind of excruciating of pages of repetitive stuff and genealogies and names and groups and it’s pretty excruciating to read because on the surface it doesn’t mean a lot when you put it all together it is important to know but especially Christianity. A lot of people are concerned with salvation and don’t really care about putting a lot of time into the Old Testament and even learning world or Christian/Jewish history and I find exactly the same Islam and every other religion. The majority of people don’t know their own doctrine so to listen to what people tell you is kind of pointless because the reality is, they’re usually pretty and not wrong at least consistently accurate and that includes Christianity, which is why we have to do the reading ourselves and do the study ourselves. I thought a lot of things about Islam, but as I read it and studied it change my mind on a lot of it. I believe it is the word of God. I think it’s very much a man-made religion, full of inconsistency and fallacies and some horrible things, I think as long as it exist, it will be a thorn in the side of free and peaceful society, but we already knew that about the lights and why was wrong for Abraham to choose to do what he did and have faith in himself making a baby with Hagar instead of Trusting God and waiting for Isaac like he was told to do. But even with studying, I don’t think you can definitively say whether or not Mohammed’s referencing of Allah was meant to be Yahweh, it’s not consistent enough to stand up to be accurate and he claims it is but much of what he claim was intentionally deceptive so the whole thing could’ve been a big lie, we don’t know.