Well, welcome, everybody, to another Engage the Faith on the historic faith.com. This is going to be a little bit different than it has been over the last year, a couple of years since we started doing this. Tonight, I have the privilege to actually pass the torch for hosting these live Q&As on to Daniel Willis. I might show up from time to time, but he's going to be the team manager, team leader for the historic faith.com. I feel incredibly blessed to have him.
I feel like if we search the whole world and should find someone who's gifted in content production and passionate about the kingdom of God, we couldn't have found a better person. So I'm really excited to introduce Daniel Willis, and I'm going to pass it over to him, and I'll be here. You could actually send your I'll be managing some of the backend stuff for this meeting. You can send your questions over my way on the chat, and I'll post them in the follow-up document for follow-up questions afterwards.
So I'll hand it to you, Daniel, and you can take it from here. Thanks a lot, Clark. And one thing about Clark that you probably don't know is he's spent a ton of time on the historic faith. If you look at the back end of this thing, it's incredibly complex and he deserves all the credit for what you see and what you, all the, not all the credit. Obviously, David gets the credit for the teaching, but all the credit for the technical things in the background. Can everybody hear me okay? Can you give me a thumbs up?
Okay, good. So first I'm going to introduce myself. I'm Daniel Willis. In my journey to try to find obedient Christianity, and I stumbled on when I was going through the head coverings and some different teachings, a lot of David's material. And thanks to David, he's really changed my life. And all of his, he's been discipling me. He's been giving me Christ's teachings and a more literal interpretation for years before I ever met him. And now I get the privilege to sit across from him and ask him your questions.
And so that's who I am. I'm just someone on a journey. And David's a great teacher. He will never say that about himself, but he definitely is. And let's see. In today's Engage of Faith, question and answers will be asking David anything. There's a lot of questions that were submitted that may not get asked today. It's kind of first come, first served. There was a lot that came in later.
So we encourage you to come back next time when we have Ask David anything and resubmit those questions as soon as you see the engaged faith question and answers coming up. And then in the last 15 minutes, if you submit your questions right now, follow up questions during this chat when David's answering these questions, if you have any questions, send them into Clark Ray and then we'll be asking those questions at the end. I mean, David will be answering those questions at the end. If we get to them, see.
David, are you ready? I'm all ready. OK. Give me one second. I need a tech man over here. I'm just kidding. Was that the first one you were playing on? Yes. Okay. Okay, from Danny Lamar, please explain how you came to the conclusion that Jesus ' name was the East in Zechariah 6:12. Okay, so this proved to be an interesting question when I got into it. First of all, I assume the question comes from the Matthew commentary, the Historic Faith commentary on Matthew, and where I make mention of it there.
And so, you know, it wasn't something a conclusion I came to or anything like that. I was just quoting actually Justin Martyr. And I looked up what I had been quoting from, and it is in his dialogue with Trypho the Jew, which for many of us, it has become one of my favorite early Christian writings. And I think a lot of people have kind of come to the same conclusion or it has affected them the same way because there is so much Old Testament teaching in it that most of us were not aware of ahead of time.
Anyway, he makes this comment, this is Justin Martyr and he says talking about Christ and that He should arise like a star from the seed of Abraham, Moses showed beforehand when he said, " A star shall arise from Jacob and a leader from Israel. " And another Scripture says, " Behold, a man, the East is His name. " So, yeah, that's where I got it from. And at the bottom of the page there, I am reading from the Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume 1. It just has this footnote after that quote.
It says, " Zechariah 6:12 according to the LXX or Septuagint. " So, yeah, what I said in the Matthew commentary was just simply from Justin Martyr's comment there from the quoting from the Ante-Nicene Fathers. But as it turns out, there's a little bit more involved or your question has made me dig a little bit deeper.
When I was reading this, reading this over Sunday evening, I thought, well, I'll probably just pull out the Orthodox Study Bible, which is what I use for the Septuagint, and just read you the passage from Zechariah 6:12 in the Septuagint. And this will be one of those questions I can answer in about 20 seconds. Well, as it turned out, I had not totally unloaded the car. There were a number of things I had brought in from church that day, and I had not brought in my little satchel that I keep my Bible in.
And it was snowing. So I thought, well, I'll just grab another Septuagint off of my bookshelf. I've got, I don't know, four or five different versions there on my bookshelf. So, I first grabbed the NETS version, which came out sometime in the 2000s, shortly before the Orthodox Study Bible. Supposed to be a scholarly edition. And I thought, well, it will work as good as any. So, reading it from the Nets, it said this, this is what the Zechariah 6:12.
And I should read it how it reads in the Masoretic text or in most Bibles, it is going to say, " Thus says the Lord of hosts saying, " Behold, the man whose name is the branch. From His place He shall branch out, and He shall build the temple of the Lord. So, most of us growing up, I mean, all my life, I'm used to Zechariah 6:12, saying, " His name shall be the branch. " So, of course, the Septuagint, a lot of prophecies, it reads a little bit differently, and this was just one of those examples.
But anyway, so when I looked it up in the nets, I thought I will just read from that. It says, " This is what the Lord Almighty says. " I am reading Zechariah 6:12 from the nets, and it says the Net Septuagint, " Behold, the man, shoot is his name. " And it's like, " What? " I was just very surprised because it's like, " Okay, shoot or branch, that's about the same. Where did they get that? That's the Masoretic text, not the Septuagint. " So I thought, " Okay, I'll just grab another one.
" The translators of the nets, they didn't have a high view of the Septuagint. And so they don't oh, like I say, their view of it is they're doing it as an academic project, not because they look at the Septuagint as perhaps an inspired translation, the way the early Christians would have looked at it, or at a minimum as this is the historical Old Testament that the apostles and the early Christians used. To them, it's just sort of an academic thing. So, okay, no big deal.
So then I thought, okay, I'll get the Brenton, which is the one done in the 1800s. And he didn't have a high view of the Septuagint either, but I thought, " Yeah, he'll be okay on this. " So I looked it up in the printing, and it said, " Behold the man whose name is the branch. " It was like, I don't believe this, two different translations that are supposed to be the Septuagint, and they're translating it the way it reads in the Masoretic text. I thought, okay, let me go to another one.
And so I went to the apostolic Bible, the polyglot. And if you don't have this, I really encourage you to get this. This is a tool that I use so much. And now what I just showed you there was a leather bound copy of it that my wife got me as a present a number of years ago, but it's actually available for free as a PDF. So I really encourage you to get it. It's called the Apostles, what is it? The Apostolic Bible, Polyglot, if you just put that in.
And unless it's changed, I think it's still a free download you can get. And it's an interlinear where you have the Septuagint in English, but then you have the Greek right next to it. And he is keyed to the Strong's numbering system. So then you can see not only the Greek word, but also the Strong's number. So if you have a Strong's Concordance or you have it, let's say in your Bible software, you can look up that Greek number and see the different meanings of the Word. And so it is so useful.
So anyway, the Apostolic Bible Polyglot said, " Behold, a male, rising is his name. " So I now looked at three different Septuagint translations, and none of them said His name is the East or anything like it. So, I went to another one. One of my readers who visited me, I guess this was this about a year ago, a year and a half ago, he gave me as a present, the Lexum Septuagint, which is a very new translation. It is done by the people who do Logos Bible Software.
And so, I looked in it, and thankfully, it says, " East is His name. " So I thought, " Okay, I am not making this up. " I knew I had gotten it from Justin Martyr, but I was beginning to doubt things having looked at those other three translations. So, I thought, " Okay, at least somebody is acknowledging it as being the East is its name. " But yeah, I was curious, okay, why do we have those other ones?
Well, in the first two instances, they were just simply following the Masoretic text instead of the Septuagint, which is, to me, terrible. The whole point of having a Septuagint translation is so somebody can read in English what the Septuagint says. And if you're going to go back and go to the Masoretic text, then you've defeated the purpose. So, but that's what, yeah, those two translations did. In that instance, they don't always do that, but they did it there.
It shows that even Bible translators, they have their own biases. And that was the bias they brought was they're used to, you know, the Masoretic text. And that would be a common bias. But it's such a strong bias that even where the Septuagint says something different, they felt like they had to make it fit the Masoretic text like, " Okay, the Septuagint guys got this all wrong, " or something like that.
But anyway, I went back then to the polyglot to see what the Greek word was there that's translated either rising as he translates it in the polyglot or as the East. And the word is Anatole. And so, I looked up the Greek, you know, number on that, looked it up in strongs, and it gives several meanings. One is Dayspring, which is the archaic word that meant dawn or sunrise, or east or rising. So the polyglot uses one of the legitimate definitions, saying rising is his name.
And I noticed in the New Testament, that Greek word, Anatole, is used ten times. And in the King James, nine of those ten times, it translates it as East. And one time is day spring, which would, like I say, in modern English, be dawn or daybreak, or sunrise, you know, something like that. So certainly East would be the ordinary way to translate that. So that's why in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, when Justin Martyr quotes that verse, his name is the East, they put East in there to translate the Greek word Anatole.
They could have put Dawn. His name is Dawn, or His name is the rising the way the polyglot does. I hope I haven't lost you in all of these details, but I am going to show you that sometimes what seems to be very simple, and I run into this all the time in working on, well, the early Christian commentary on Matthew and then working this past year on Romans, so many times there's a word and it's like, this doesn't seem to fit. What's the reason behind this? What is the word? What are the different meanings?
And yeah, I discovered all kinds of things that often shed a lot of light and often make something that's simple, a lot more complicated than it might look at first glance. Okay, so yeah, I looked up a number of early Christian writers in what they had to say about Zechariah 6:12.
And interestingly, every one of them, when they're discussing that verse, and the different translators translate their words and when they directly quote Zechariah 6:12, some of them translate it as the dawn, some as rising, some as Dayspring. I mean, you know, different ways. But when you look at what they are saying, they're all talking about the rising of the sun, the light that Jesus would bring into the world.
And so that would make the most sense as a translation of Zechariah 6: 12, based on how the early Christians are understanding that passage, would be the dawn is His name or the Daybreak is His name, something like that. Because they see with Christ Jesus what Zechariah has prophesied is the rising of the Son, Jesus Christ being the Son, Sun Son, and the giving of light that Jesus brought. So, yeah, East may not be the best translation there. Daybreak or Dawn, I think, would be a better translation.
Rising is perfectly legitimate as well as the rising of the Sun. Now, I went back then to this passage in the Ante-Nicene Fathers to look at what all Justin Martyr says, just what is he thinking? Is He thinking East or is He thinking sunrise? What is He thinking? So I will go back to where I was. It says, " And another Scripture says, " Behold a man, the East is His name. " This is how they translate it here, okay? But He is saying Anatole. So, yeah, we have to choose how to translate it.
But this is what Justin Martyr says next. " Accordingly, when a star rose in heaven at the time of his birth, as is recorded in the memoirs of his apostles, the Magi from Arabia, recognizing the sign by this, came and worshipped him. " So he's talking about a star rising in heaven. So maybe rising is how Justin Martyr is thinking of that Word, or he may be thinking of Daybreak. I'm not sure, but he doesn't seem to be thinking of East.
So, I'm really glad, Danny, that you asked the question, because I would not have realized that if I hadn't gone back and dug that out. But it also shows now why the Ante-Nicene Fathers put it this way. I know what they were doing, because the Magi, what they said was we saw his star in the east, or at least that's how the King James translates it, okay? So they're matching the words of Justin Martyr to the words of the Magi. But see, in the Greek, that's a perfectly good translation.
We saw his star in the east, but another translation could be, we saw his star at the dawn. In other words, this star was so bright that it was like Venus, that's called the Morning Star, that you can see it even at Daybreak, when most other stars now you can no longer see in the sky, it stands out there brightly. So they may be saying we saw this star in the dawn, or we saw this star rising at its rising. Any of those would work.
So, yeah, it's very interesting how Greek words so often have a number of meanings and you can change it. Now, here there's no doctrinal significance to it, but sometimes there is great doctrinal significance based on how you translate the Greek. So, anyway, I hope I didn't bore any of you or lose you with those details. But I was wanting to illustrate, again, just how often looking at modern translators, their biases affect them and they jump to conclusions often.
Instead of looking at what the early Christians are actually saying and translating things based on their reasoning, and instead of they sometimes do it the exact opposite. All right, I think we're ready for the next question. Yeah, that's amazing. We love having you as someone who will dig so deep into something that may not have any doctrinal influence. It's a quite amazing feat. If someone asked me that question, I would have not been able to go there.
What's interesting, I'll just comment on that, you know, particularly working on these commentaries. Sometimes I'll spend a whole day digging something out. In the end, I decide, you know, it's not that important and it never makes it to the commentary. And that's probably happened. For everything that's in there, there is probably just as much time spent on something that I dug out and in the end I thought, eh, it probably doesn't make the cut. It is not that critical.
But yeah, there's a lot of interesting things when you start digging in the Septuagint, which was the Bible of the early church, and then looking at their writings, you know, what they are saying, et cetera. Well, this next one, I have never heard of this before. There is a legend out there that before his public ministry began, Jesus ran a yoke shop and used the slogan, my yokes fit well. Is this based on any genuine sources?
Okay, and Richard, now yours, I thought the previous question was gonna be one I could answer in 30 seconds. And yours, I pretty much can. No, that's totally made up. I don't know who made it up, you know, where you heard it or read it, but someone made it up out of the blue. But one reason I particularly wanted to answer this question or make sure we fit it in tonight, was there's so much of this kind of false information out there. These stories about things they might be supposedly historical things.
They might be things supposedly about the apostles or about physics or, you know, geography or whatnot pertaining to the ancient world. And you see them in commentaries, in study Bibles, you hear them in sermons, and there is absolutely no source. At some point, someone, and we usually don't know who it was, just totally made it up, basically just lied like that one. I mean, there's nothing even close to that. There's no hint that would make somebody think that. So somebody, oh, it'd make a nice story.
They were probably talking about, you know, my yoke is easy or kindly, and my burden is light. And, oh, okay, this would be a great story. And then someone hears that and it's like, wow, this is a great sermon illustration. And so I hear more fake stuff, fake history about, you know, the New Testament and the early church, then I do real stuff. Because the fake stuff is often, you know, very interesting. It makes a nice story, but it's a lie.
So how you find out is, if you can't track down the source, it's probably fictitious. You know, if it were me, I would not repeat it in a sermon or a Bible study or anything. If you can track it down, you know, okay, this is where it was, let's say it's in a book, do they have a footnote? A lot of books, if they don't have a footnote, again, it's probably made up. If they had an actual historical source, they would have cited it. There's no citation or anything. You can be 99% sure it's made up.
But even if they have a footnote, look and see what the footnote is. If it's not to a primary source, that is to something written in the days of the early church or the New Testament, then yeah, it's still worthless, you know? In other words, they didn't have a historical source, someone made it up, and this writer in this book is just quoting from somebody else. And maybe that person was quoting someone else. But yeah, you can't ever trace it back to an original source.
So, yeah, be careful when you are passing these things on. And I think you asked the question because you wanted to be careful. But yeah, if there's not a source quoted, you can be fairly certain it's because it's made up. And you'd think Christians wouldn't do that, but they do it all the time. Okay, this one's from Paul Brown. Where did the majority of early Christians live in the country or the city? Why did they emphasize evangelism or separation?
The reason I ask is because I need to make a move to locate near a church. Do I move to a local city or to the country? Okay, so this has got like three parts to the question. And like all of these, these are all good questions. So we don't have a census to be able to say, well, we know exactly this or that. But I would feel pretty confident in saying that most of the early Christians were city dwellers, just because, well, probably most of the population were city dwellers in the Roman Empire.
I could be mistaken on that. I've never looked at any source on that. But, you know, Rome was maybe about a million people. So it would take a lot of country dwellers just to, you know, equal Rome. And then you had a number of other cities that numbered in the hundreds of thousands like Alexandria and Antioch. So, I'm going to guess most of the Christians were in the cities.
I mean, looking at the New Testament, you know, you look at Paul's journeys, you look at the church, it was founded in Jerusalem, the largest city in Judea, and a large city in its own right. You have then the first place they're called Christians is in Antioch, which was the third largest city in the Roman Empire. You have Paul's letters to Rome, the largest city probably in the world at that time, to the Ephesians. Ephesus was, again, maybe the fourth largest. It was one of the very large cities of the Empire.
Corinth, you know, so on. And you can see in his travels, he spent most of his time in cities. He did go through the country. He did preach there as well, but most of his visits were in the cities. And again, I think it's a fairly safe assumption. Most of this early Christians were city dwellers, but that they had a prejudice against living in the country. No.
I noticed I remembered this and I just looked up the quote to get it to make sure I was quoting it correctly, but I remember this from back when I first read this back in the mid-1980s. This is Justin Martyr in his first apology, and he is describing what Christians did on Sunday, what the worship service was like. That's why it stuck with me. He says, " And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place.
And the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. So he mentions the ones who live in the cities or the ones in the country. They assemble together. So Christians were in both places. It wasn't exclusively one or the other, but you know most of the early Christian writers are associated with the city. And like I say, it would appear that that's where most of them lived. Okay, so you ask why?
Well, evangelism in the sense, if you're going to evangelize, if you're going to spend a lot of time, like Paul, you're a full-time evangelist, you know it makes most sense to go where people are. And you can reach a lot more people in a city by going to the marketplace, by going to the synagogues there than to, you know, a small rural town of, say, 50 or 100 people. You could reach people, but for the same amount of time, you could reach maybe 10, 20 times more people by going to a city.
So that's why the evangelists generally went to the cities, but they went everywhere, everywhere God evangelized. And like, you know, Paul's letter, I thought of, he writes to the Galatians, well, Galatia was not a city, it was a region in what would be modern day Turkey. Ankara was the capital of it, just like it's the capital of modern-day Turkey. But in Paul's day, Ankara wasn't a huge city or anything.
So, yeah, he seems to have visited small villages there is why he writes to the Christians in the whole region. So, again, it's not like, oh, if you lived in the country, you were cut out of things. But if you were interested in evangelism, I think you would have moved to a city because you could reach people, you know, a lot easier, more people for the same amount of time. So today, if you're interested in evangelism, you're going to reach a lot more people in a city than you are going out in the country.
Now, nowhere do you read any early Christians saying, let's move out in the country because we want to get away from the evil influence of the cities. And their cities back then were just as evil, maybe more evil, than cities are today. And you don't see that at all in the New Testament. You know, the Christians are going to the cities right into the heart of where Satan had his strongholds and taking the gospel there.
So this idea of, yeah, let's get out of the country away from evil influences, where you first see that attitude is with the monks. You start seeing it in the, oh, I'd say mid to late third century, and then particularly in the fourth century and all that. Let's go out in the desert away from the cities. And that's fine. I mean, the monks did accomplish a lot. And I'm not going to not doing that. They didn't purport that all Christians should do that.
They did it just because they wanted to spend their time in prayer and contemplation. But they also did a lot of teaching because people would then go from the cities out into the desert to talk to them and to listen to them teach. And so they ended up actually having quite an influence and quite an audience. But they weren't trying to evangelize by doing that. So today, your question, yeah, where do I move to a city or to the country? Now, this is just David Bercot. This has nothing to do with the historic faith.
I would say find a church that you can embrace where you and your family are going to do well spiritually. That, okay, you really like their vision, you like the people there. This is a church you can really be part of. If that church is in the city, fine. If it is a country church, fine. I mean, you can serve God either place. Again, it is not good for all Christians to get out in the country and not do any evangelism. You know, you are not going to be very effective in evangelizing the countryside.
Or evangelizing in a city if you don't have a church located in the city. I mean, we're not in a very big city. It's a Chambersburg PA. It's, I don't know, population 20,000, the metropolitan area would maybe be more like 30,000, something like that. But we started our church because we wanted to be in the city. We got, in fact, we're right downtown in the city of Chambersburg, but it was for that specific person. We wanted to reach that specific reason. We wanted to reach people.
We wanted to be in the city to do that. If you get way out in the country, like I said, you're going to kill evangelism. It doesn't have to be one or the other. But for your family, I'd say, yeah, make a choice where you can flourish as a family and join that church, whether it's in the city or in the country. Yeah, I totally agree. When I chose Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, we were looking for churches where we could submit to the brothers, submit to the brotherhood and elders.
And we went to so many evangelical churches where they condoned just about everything that it was such a breath of fresh air to find Chambersburg. This is also another one from Paul Brown. Why do Anabaptists quote Protestants who hold Arminian doctrines like Charles Finney, Wesley, et cetera? I thought Anabaptists were neither Protestant nor Catholic. Okay. A question is something that is maybe my pet peeve. You probably weren't aware of that when you asked the question.
But yeah, it bothers me when the Anabaptists or any kingdom Christians start quoting Protestants, particularly where the Protestants are in error. Now, I will sometimes quote John Wesley or Charles Finney. Of Protestant teachers, I would say they were perhaps two who were closer to the truth than most. John Wesley says a lot of things that are right. It's just spot on. And Charles Finney as well. So if you're going to quote a Protestant, I would say those would be the two I would be most apt perhaps to quote.
And yeah, I don't see any problem with that. I mean, I don't think as kingdom Christians, either as Anabaptists or, you know, just kingdom Christians in general, we don't want to get so exclusive that, yeah, we can't quote from anyone else. You know, we're the only ones who have any truth or knowledge or all that. ' Cause it's not the case.
And there have been people, I mean, even Martin Luther, who, as most of my readers or listeners would know, I'm not a big fan of his teaching, well, or as a person to a large degree. And yet I appreciate that he started the Reformation. And, you know, none of us know the course of history if he hadn't come along. I think a Reformation would have happened. It was certainly ripe for it, but he's the one who put out, you know, risked, his neck and all of that.
But when you read his writings, I often quote some of the, you know, a lot of the things that he's badly in error on, but he says a lot of things that are, yeah, very apt observations, correct teaching of Scripture and all of that. So I don't think we ever want to get up on, you know, a little mountaintop that we can't quote anyone else who is not Anabaptist or a kingdom Christian. On the other hand, like I say, it just, oh, it grieves me.
When I hear a pastor and he's quoting, let's say Tim Keller or somebody, you know, a Calvinist, and it's like, what on earth? These are the people who put our forefathers to death. I mean, not that we carry a grudge or anything, but why are we quoting them? I mean, our forefathers could have avoided persecution by accepting what John Calvin taught and what Zwingli taught and all of that. And so we turn right around and start quoting, particularly quoting these people when they are in error.
And, you know, that grieves me that that happens so much. And yeah, in my congregation, I probably have to say something if somebody does that. Like I say, it's great when somebody quotes, say, let's say John Wesley or something that's spot on. But yeah, when they quote particularly a modern writer who is just teaching what is not the historic faith and is not Anabaptist doctrine, then yeah, to me, that shouldn't happen in our churches. So, yeah, thank you for your question. Yeah, thanks a lot.
Our next one is from Brother Elam Peachy. Over the years, I've heard two opposing teachings. One is we need strong churches so we can have strong families. The other one is we need strong families so we can have strong churches. How would you reconcile these two opposing views? Okay, Daniel and I were talking about this right before we went live, and we both had concluded the same thing. They're actually not opposing teachings. They are very much in harmony. You need both.
Strong churches, particularly they have a lot of teaching on godly homes, order in the home, just general Christian discipleship. They're going to produce strong families, or they're going to at least help to nurture them. Likewise, godly families are strong building blocks of a church. I mean, if you have a bunch of ungodly, worldly families, it's going to be hard to have a strong, biblical kingdom church. In fact, I don't think you can have it. So you need both.
A strong biblical church to nurture and build up strong families. You need strong families, in turn, help to make a strong, godly church. But I will mention one thing, and sometimes it does come down to one or the other. It shouldn't. But I saw this a lot, and it may still be around. I'm just not in those circles right now. But back in the 1990s, in home churches that often grew out of the homeschool movement, that I was living in Texas at the time.
In Texas, it got going fairly strong in the 1980s and was still burgeoning, burgeoning, growing into the 1990s and probably on. So what you ended up happening was families getting very focused on, well, a lot of them were Bill Gothard families. They went to the seminar sponsored by Bill Gothard, which was aimed at building up godly families. What would happen is the family became the main unit, and perhaps it is the primary unit. Perhaps that isn't wrong.
But these homeschooling families became so connected as a family, they disconnected to a degree from the church. They were a family first and part of a church second. And I don't think you see that in the New Testament. You see the church and you see people being part of the church. And the church, I think, was the stronger loyalty. Particularly in the New Testament, a lot of the members of the extended family wouldn't have been believers. But like I say, normally it shouldn't be a conflict.
But what did happen, I saw it and experienced it in the 1990s was you'd get maybe a home church made up of a bunch of homeschool families. Well, they were families first. The family came first. And the idea of submitting very much giving up very much to the leadership of the church or to the authority of the church, they would push against that. No, this is how our family does it.
And no, you know, and if push comes to shove, we would just change, go to another house church because, yeah, the family was the overall unit. Well, yeah, Jesus said, " On this rock, I will build my church. " And so I do think the church is the dominant thing that the Kingdom of God is comprised of. Again, godly families play a major role. And normally, you know, there shouldn't be any conflict.
But yeah, you can raise the family loyalty and the godliness of the family up so high that you have a weak church because, you know, no one will submit to a greater authority than the head of the family. Great. Here's another one from Elam. Does Kingdom teach and before I read this one, if you have any follow-up questions, send them to Clark Ray. We have five more minutes. If we don't have any, we'll just continue with all the questions that were submitted.
Okay, so Elam Peachy says, " Does kingdom teaching affect the way we evangelize? Would it tend to be a stumbling block for potential converts or does it make it easier to reach people? " Okay, my experience is it's harder to reach people with the kingdom gospel today. But now we should understand that originally there was only one gospel and that was the kingdom gospel. I mean, when Jesus went out preaching, he preached the gospel of the kingdom. And, you know, he converted lots of people.
When Paul went out, he was preaching the gospel of the kingdom. I mean, turn to the last chapter of Acts, read those last couple of verses, you know, that He taught the Kingdom of God to the people who came to them Him in Rome when He was a prisoner there. So, yeah, I mean, originally, it would be hard to say, was it harder to evangelize with the kingdom gospel? Because that's all the gospel there was. That's all the gospel there ever should be. So, yeah, in itself, I mean, it's not that we back away from it.
But nowadays, and ever since Luther, we have two gospels, we have the kingdom gospel, and then we have, I call it, it's a little bit unfair maybe, the gospel of easy believism, okay, or to put it in more neutral terms, the gospel of salvation by faith alone, which has been accompanied from the days of Luther with one saved, always saved, okay? Now, if you're going to go out and preach on the streets, preach at a college campus, whatever, it's a whole lot easier to make converts.
If all that's required is, you know, we're going to ask you to come forward or maybe just stay in your seats and say this prayer, invite Jesus in your heart, and that's it. Now you are saved, you're guaranteed heaven. If your conversion was real, if you really meant it when you prayed that prayer, that's it, you're saved. Well, if that's what you're going out and preaching, well, yeah, it's a whole lot easier to make a lot of converts with that kind of message.
Now, I'll go on to say that a lot of the people who, that's how they came to Christ was with a message like that, they go on to become very committed Christians. Sometimes they never are taught the full kingdom gospel, but they are strong disciples of Christ in most areas of their life. Like I say, there's usually a little bit missing because they haven't heard the kingdom gospel. So, I'm not saying that, you know, none of those people are Christians, but it's a lot easier.
Yeah, if that's all that's required to get a lot of, you can go back and say, " Yeah, we made this many converts, " or, " We had this many decisions at our revival meeting, " or that sort of thing. This many people came forward, et cetera. When you're preaching the gospel of the kingdom, particularly nowadays, you're competing against the gospel of easy believism.
And so, yeah, now you're not just competing against the world like they were in the beginning, but yeah, you're having to compete against a different gospel. So it makes it harder. But, I mean, so be it. I mean, the Gospel of the Kingdom is what is true. And we should shrink back like, " Oh, this is too hard. No one is going to accept this. " They accepted it back in the early centuries when it meant they were going to be put to death very likely. And yet they were still willing to accept that.
So, yeah, we shouldn't think, oh yeah, this is too hard today. There's no point trying to go out and spread this gospel. It's too difficult. No, it's harder for people to embrace, obviously, than one of just invite Jesus in your heart. But again, it's the gospel Jesus preached. It's the gospel Paul preached. Gospel Peter preached. And they've made lots of disciples. So we can do the same today. There are still people hungry today.
And we have to always remember, as Jesus said, no one can come to the Father unless can come to Him unless the Father draws Him. So the Father is out there drawing people to Himself, to His Son. He just needs us to go out there where He can use us as tools to work along with Him. So we shouldn't imagine that we have to do this by, you know, our wits. You know, how do we make this more pleasing to people or by being a great speaker or anything like that?
It doesn't depend on our power, but we should use our best efforts and we should certainly prove ourselves to be good workmen working along with God. But like I say, the exciting thing is He's there. His Spirit is what's going to open people's hearts and make it possible for the kingdom gospel to penetrate. So yeah, we shouldn't shrink back like, oh, this is going to be too hard to spread this gospel. Yeah, great. Thanks a lot, Elam, for those questions. I totally agree.
The gospel that calls for sacrifice in every part of our life is much more difficult to accept than you can just believe this and you don't have to change anything. And that's not the true gospel. So we have another question from Clark, I don't know if you're listening, but I do not have any follow-up questions from you yet, so I'm going to keep moving on.
From an anonymous member, it says, " Would it be possible for me and my brother to translate some of your teachings into German to spread the historic faith here in Germany? " And I should explain this. This was not submitted anonymously. Just because of his follow-up question, I thought maybe I shouldn't publish his name. But, oh, absolutely. We would love to see these publications be translated into German or any language.
Any of the books I've written, any of the books that Scroll Publishing publishes, you have our permission. I mean, please send an email or something. Let us know you're planning to do this. But yeah, we don't ask for any kind of payment or any royalty on it. Yeah, loved or any of my messages to translate any of my oral messages to translate them into German would be great. One reason you should check with us.
Now, 30 years ago, yeah, it's about 30 years ago, a brother in Germany translated will the real heretics please stand up into German. I do not know what became of that German translation. I lost touch with that brother. So I don't know if that could be retrieved. I do have some contacts in Germany, not a lot. But yeah, if you're thinking of that book, let's see if we can maybe find the German version and get it resurrected.
And to my knowledge, I don't think the kingdom that turned the world upside down has been translated into German. But again, email scroll publishing, because our son, Andre, who handles most of the business and the practical end of scroll publishing, he would know which books have been translated into which languages. I'd hate for someone to spend, you know, hours and hours translating a book. And it turns out, you know, that's already been translated into that language.
And then normally what's going to happen with a foreign language book like that, foreign if you're English, it's of course not the foreign language to you, but to non-English languages, I should say, is there going to get put up as a PDF online and maybe out as an e-book, something like that. There's usually not, it's not going to be enough readership to justify doing a hard printing of it. But again, it can spread through the internet, and that's what's happened with a lot of languages.
I think we can do his next question. Yeah, this is his next one. This is a lot. I wouldn't want to, I'm glad you're answering the questions. A question regarding marriage. If during the engagement period, someone made a covenant with his fiance before God, an oral pledge to never, ever separate, does this constitute a marriage before God? They never got married and the engagement was broken through fornication. Okay, it's yeah an interesting question.
At this point, like I said, as I started off with my first question tonight, in my books, what I'm trying to teach is the historic faith, what the early Christians taught, and leave as much of myself out of it. I mean, my personal opinion doesn't carry very much weight. In a question like this, what you're going to have is my personal opinion.
I mean, obviously, I've been studying the Bible my entire life, and I've been reading and studying the early Christians for the last 35 years, most of my adult life, studying them. But something like this is never discussed among the early Christians. So I can't give you an answer from there. Just from a biblical answer, I would say, no, that's not a marriage. I mean, and I would think of the example of Joseph and Mary. Now, they got betrothed, and that was a very serious thing in the Judaic community.
Normally, the parents on both sides would enter into a written contract. There would be a marriage contract. And if the parents weren't living on both sides, normally the girls ' parents, the man would often be older because he was having to accept the responsibility of supporting his wife and the children that would come. And often as a young man, he would not have the funds to be able to do that. So, often he was older.
His parents might have died by that, by the time he is marrying, which would have been, well, in the case of Jesus, his father would have died. The girl usually would have been younger. So usually her parents would have been around if she wasn't an orphan. And so like I said, usually there's a marriage contract, a very formal thing. And that's why Joseph, when he thought Mary had committed fornication, yeah, he couldn't just walk away or that. It says he was going to divorce her. That Greek word can mean put away.
He was going to have to take some steps to just end it. He couldn't just, you know, write her a letter. There probably had been a contract, a binding legal contract. But yeah, fornication would have been grounds to break it. So I do see in the Bible, yeah, there is a distinction between marriage and betrothal. The Bible doesn't set out all the specifics that have to happen for a marriage. I mean, as you go from Genesis to the New Testament, it seems to be a little different in different periods of time.
But there is that understanding we have become man and wife. And in an engagement, the understanding is we plan to become man and wife. It's like Joseph and Mary. Yeah, we're intending to. But then something happened, or he was going to break it because it looked like she had been unfaithful, had committed fornication. So in this, I would say, no, that was not a marriage. Now, there was a pledge there that perhaps I would say this person, I don't know if you were writing about yourself or about somebody else.
I think God is merciful enough that that pledge could be released from God. But I think illustrates why it's not a good idea to be making pledges and vows to God unless it's something totally within your own power. And yeah, you're going to you know follow through with it. So like a vow, I'm never going to get married. People made those vows. Reading Paul, it sounds like people made those vows in the period of the New Testament, but then keep it if you're going to make that vow.
But when you're talking about a vow of getting married, it's not just you involved, it's another person. And so to me, it's just not something appropriate. You can pledge, you know, with God, you know that before God, you know we pledge we will get married to show that you're taking it seriously and you know that God is witnessing what you are doing. But the whole reason why there is a betrothal period or an engagement period is because things do happen.
And often the course of wisdom is to not follow through and get married. And in this case, it sounds like that's what happened. So no, I don't think this person, whether it's you or someone else is now married and cannot get married. But yeah, there is that pledge that I guess I would go before God and ask before Him to be released and perhaps the leaders of your church as well to be released from that. But like I said, I think the lesson is just be careful in making pledges and vows.
I mean, there is a time to make them. I mean, it's not wrong to make a vow, and we make a vow at the time of our baptism. But yeah, then keep that. It's not a light thing that God expects us to keep our vows. Do you think the next question can be answered in four minutes? Yes, easily. Okay. This one is from Dale Martin. What aspects of pagan culture did the early Christians speak out the most venomously against in their day?
Okay, so just going by their writings, I would say probably the thing they talk about the most would be idolatry. That was, of course, that was part of evangelism as well. If you're going to bring someone into Christianity, you've got to show them that idolatry is false religion, that God cannot be worshiped through idols, and no idol is a god.
And probably the second thing they talked about most was all of the false gods of the Greeks and the Romans, as well as the Egyptians and other countries as well, that these aren't real gods, that there is only one God, and there is not a multitude of gods, and that all of these gods, none of them could ever fit the qualifications of being the real God who created us because they are all wicked. You know, so many things connected with them that would disqualify them from actually being the real God.
So those would be the two things you see the most. Now, talking just about cultural things, you do see a lot about the entertainment, the wicked entertainment of their day, the sporting contests, the theater, the gladiator games, things like that. They talk about the dress, not only immodest as far as being revealing, but the luxuriousness of the dress that rich women wore and the jewelry, things like that. There's a number of passages that address that. They talk about abandoning children and abortion.
So those would be just some of the things I would say that you see addressed a good bit. Also divorce and remarriage, you see addressed a good bit in the early Christian writings. But by far, idolatry and the pagan gods, I would say, would be the two big ones. Great. Well, thanks a lot, David.
I want to ask everybody, well, first of all, I want to say that I firmly believe that if all of our churches, men, women, and children, go through the historic faith, that if we really get to know it, we'll be able to look at all different kinds of teachers and know almost instantly if they're teaching something false or leading us astray, and we'll be much more equipped to spread the gospel, to understand what the gospel of the kingdom is, and to live it out and practice and word and thought and deed.
And obviously practice is what I said. And David, he was 35 years old when he started this journey with the early Christians and everybody out there that's 35 years old, it's not too late. When you're, what, 50? I'm 71. When you're 71, we don't all have the caliber of the brain that David has, but we can definitely work really hard and make a big impact on the world. And yeah, so I challenge you to start groups to spread these courses and to work hard. It's hard work. It's like going to the gym.
It's not always fun, but a lot of times it is fun, but the reward is much more important than running a race for a prize that doesn't last. So yeah, thanks for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you in the next and sorry I didn't say hi to everybody, but we look forward to seeing you all in the next Engage of Faith Question and Answers, which will be next month. Thanks a lot. Okay, thank you all.
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