You Are the Christ, the Son of the Living God

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Lord of Spirits

Episode: You Are the Christ, the Son of the Living God

Date: February 9, 2024
Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Theme: How did people who encountered Jesus during his earthly ministry come to recognize him as the Messiah? The episode explores what it means to call Jesus "the Christ," not merely as fulfillment of prophecy but as the embodiment of Israel, the Torah, and the God of Israel, according to Orthodox Christian tradition.

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1. Episode Overview

Main Question:
How did those who met Jesus in person recognize him as the Messiah, even before many of the prophetic "criteria" were fulfilled? What did it mean for Jesus to be "the Christ," and how did people discern this in him?

Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen challenge reductionist apologetics and dig into what the earliest followers of Jesus saw and experienced. They examine how Jesus was perceived as embodying the story and suffering of Israel, fulfilling and personifying the Torah, and uniquely revealing Israel’s God in human flesh.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. Not Merely Fulfillment of a Checklist

(04:47–12:50)

• The hosts reject a "checklist" or purely predictive approach to prophecy fulfillment in determining Jesus’ identity as Messiah.
• Messianic expectations varied: kingly Messiah (political liberation), priestly Messiah (temple restoration), and more; most of these were not evidently fulfilled in Jesus’ earthly life.
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 10:07):
  “If a Jewish person says to you, name one prophecy of the Old Testament that Jesus uniquely fulfills, you’re not going to be able to come up with one that's going to satisfy him… That’s not how Old Testament prophecy works.”

Takeaway:

The Messianic identity was not deduced by adding up completed predictions; rather, it was rooted in a deeper recognition that went beyond lists and "proof texts."

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B. Three-fold Embodiment: Israel, Torah, and God

1. Jesus Embodies Israel

(17:09–45:47)

• In the Gospels, especially Matthew, Jesus is shown as reliving and fulfilling Israel’s entire story:
  • Fleeing to and returning from Egypt parallels Israel’s exodus.
  • 40 days in the wilderness parallels Israel’s 40 years (but Jesus succeeds where Israel fails).
  • Casting out demons mirrors Israel’s partial conquest over the ancient giants and unclean spirits.
  • The Sermon on the Mount echoes Moses receiving the Law on Sinai.
• Jesus’ suffering and death recapitulate Israel’s exile and suffering for her sins—but he suffers innocently, thus doing so "for Israel’s sins."
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 17:37): “They came to see Jesus as the Messiah because they saw that Jesus embodied Israel. The experience, the historical experience of Israel, was embodied in and by Jesus as a person.”
• Prophecies like Ezekiel 37 (valley of dry bones) are seen not only as national restoration but as resurrection—fulfilled in Christ, Israel’s representative.

Notable Moment:

Fr. Stephen reads Ezekiel 37, drawing a line from Israel’s "hopeless death" to resurrection through Jesus (31:02–36:00).

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2. Jesus Embodies the Torah

(52:21–92:14)

• “Fulfilling the Law” means embodying and filling it entirely, not replacing or abolishing it.
• Torah is not merely "law" in a legalistic sense but is a "way of life," best translated as "teaching" or, in Greek, nomos—a comprehensive way of being.
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 55:13):
  “To fulfill [the Torah]...is to fill it full, fill it up to overflowing.”
• Jesus’ teachings are not arbitrary or "new material." Rather, he lives, teaches, and interprets the Torah as its author.
• Jesus’ critiques of the Pharisees are not that they keep the Torah too much but that they misunderstand or fail to live it from the heart.
• St. Paul’s metaphor of "walking according to the Spirit" parallels the Torah’s way of life; if you walk in the Spirit, you naturally fulfill the Torah without needing to obsess over rule-keeping.
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 65:17):
  “…They see that [Jesus] embodies that way of life, that he embodies that way of seeing the world, that way of seeing others, that way of communicating, that way of teaching.”

Notable Moment:

Fr. Andrew compares Torah-observance to learning music: rules are needed for beginners, but true mastery is when the music becomes internalized and spontaneous (85:25–87:27).

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3. Jesus Embodies Israel’s God

(95:15–129:40)

• Jesus’ humanity acts as a “veil” (like the one in the Temple), not hiding but mercifully shielding divine glory (98:46–99:03).
• From the bottom up: The Apostles interacted with Jesus as fully human—yet came to realize he was Israel’s God in the flesh.
• Jesus reflects the humility of God: God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (humble Bedouins), the God of slaves and wandering nobodies, not worldly empires.
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 103:01):
  “He identifies himself as the God of three generations of nomadic Bedouins. That’s not that big of a brag...This is what we’re getting at when we talk about the humility of God.”
• Christ’s poverty, humble origins, and suffering mirror the God who identifies with the weak, suffering, and outcast.
• The pattern of God’s faithfulness and Israel’s repeated rejection is mirrored in Jesus’ rejection and crucifixion.

Notable Moment:

Reading of a Holy Week hymn juxtaposed with Jeremiah 3:19–21 to show the lament of God over his people’s faithlessness—the same laments addressed to Israel in the Old Testament are recapitulated in the Passion narrative (116:06–118:35).

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C. Addressing Accusations of Anti-Semitism

(119:14–129:40)

• The contention over Holy Week language (“the Jews…” etc.) is not racist blame, but a direct engagement with the biblical narrative of Israel’s rejection of her God—a theme taken straight from the Old Testament itself.
• Attempts to “de-Judaize” Christianity—removing or downplaying the Jewish context, or making Christ merely “universal” and detached from Israel—are in fact the real erasures of heritage.
• Quote (Fr. Stephen, 128:55):
  “The people who want to edit your Holy Week book and take out all the references to the Jews, the people who want to make Christianity not Jewish anymore. They're the antisemitites.”

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Fr. Stephen (09:57):
  “They very much did not think of it in terms of Jesus fulfilling a list of prophecies in the Old Testament… Jesus does fulfill every prophecy about the Messiah. Right. But prophecy doesn’t work in that sort of specific prediction, check it off the list way…”

• Fr. Andrew (49:27):
  “Totus Christus caput et corpus—the whole Christ, head and body.”

• Fr. Stephen (102:12):
  “We see over and over again in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, the humility of God.”

• Fr. Stephen (145:00):
  “Christianity is Judaism. It is a form of Judaism, not it was. It is … Our argument with Rabbinic Judaism is who's right about Judaism?”

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4. Key Timestamps

• Opening theme and introduction: 00:00–04:42
• Discussion: Prophecy, "checklists," and Messianic expectations: 04:42–17:09
• First Main Section: Jesus as "Embodied Israel": 17:09–45:47
• Second Main Section: Jesus as "Embodied Torah": 52:21–92:14
• Third Main Section: Jesus as "Embodied God of Israel": 95:15–129:40
• Addressing accusations of Christian anti-Semitism, the continuity with Israel and the Jewish roots of Christianity: 119:14–129:40
• Final thoughts on personal encounter with Christ, heritage, and the meaning of embracing the Messiah: 130:13–end

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5. Final Reflections

• Fr. Andrew:
  It’s not about checking theological boxes but about a living encounter with the Messiah. “To be a Christian means that they have met Christ”—an experience that’s transformative and unfolds in worship, scripture, love, and community. Christ is found here, in his church, the body where “Christ is in our midst.”
  (130:13–138:51)

• Fr. Stephen:
  Reclaims the sense of heritage and spiritual ancestry—that we Gentiles were grafted into the spiritual family of Abraham, called out of idolatry into the people of God. Attempts to erase Christianity's Jewish roots are not merely theological errors but a betrayal of Christian identity itself.
  (139:02–145:00)

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6. Summary Table: The Three Main Aspects of Christ’s Identification as Messiah

| Aspect | Evidence in Jesus’ Life | Significance / Quotes | |------------------------|-------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------| | Embodies Israel | Exodus/Egypt, wilderness, suffering | “He is Israel, and so he is Israel’s Messiah.” (17:37) | | Embodies the Torah | Teaching, living, interpreting law | “He embodies that way of seeing the world, that way of teaching.” (65:17) | | Embodies Israel’s God | His humility, identity, suffering | “He embodies the God of Israel in a new, unique way.” (97:35) |

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For new listeners:
This episode offers a deep dive into the Orthodox Christian understanding of Christ as the Messiah—one which transcends simplistic apologetic arguments and calls us to a living experience of Jesus, rooted in the whole story, law, and God of Israel. The message: To truly encounter Christ is to see him as the fulfillment and embodiment of all that God has done for and through Israel, and as the very presence of the living God among us.

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[All times in MM:SS format. Quotes are lightly edited for clarity.]

Transcript

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation. This the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

Good evening to you all. Giant killers, dragon slayers, stompers of scorpions. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. And my most esteemed co host, The Very Reverend Dr. Stephen DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, in the midst of the swamp. And I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in the beautiful forests and hills of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And we're live. And if you are listening to us live, although we know that 99% of you are not, but if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346 and you can talk to us. We're going to get to your calls in the second half of the show. And our own Matuska Trudy will be taking those calls.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We've got some competition tonight too. I don't know if you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're having the WrestleMania 40.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Press conference in about an hour live from Las Vegas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, so you're saying we have to get this done in an hour so you can.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, no, that's fine. I'm just saying, you know, people attention diverted. And the heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune is interviewing Vladimir Putin right now as well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I heard that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's. It's airing. I heard that. So I could have told them not to go up against Lord of Spirits. Right. Like.

This is a bad programming decision to try to compete with us. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I think there's a big audience overlap there for sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But what can you do?

What can you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's a dog eat dog world here in Internet radio. Yeah, yeah. Well.

That said, when speaking of Jesus as the Messiah, most people will point to the many Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, that he fulfilled the acts that he did, which fit with what the prophets foretold. And this is, of course, a good and correct thing to do. Yet such an affirmation may overlook a question we should ask about what is actually happening in the Gospels. What did the people who met Jesus in person mean when they pointed at him and identified him as the Messiah? How did they recognize him to be the Messiah even when he had not yet done most, or in some cases, any of the actions that we now look back on in retrospect and match up with his whole life and ministry? What was it about their experience of him on the ground that made them say, this is the Christ?

So, Father Stephen, is this actually just another episode defining what the word Messiah means?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Oh, but also no.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like that pirate and that meme. Yeah. I don't even know what show that's from, but that's the. Yes, but actually no meme.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Looks like Wallace and Gromit to me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

Yeah, we do need to disambiguate here a little at the beginning. Right. Because we already did a full episode on sort of the concept of the Messiah, especially in Second Temple Jewish literature, the different concepts of the Messiah, sometimes of messiahs and that kind of thing. And we are not retreading that here tonight, at least not that much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is as in your intro, we're coming at this from another angle.

But so we talked about all that. We talked about Mashiach in Hebrew, Christos in Greek, meaning the anointed one. This is particularly associated with an anointed king, with the Davidic king.

We also talked about how.

There were. We find in Second Temple literature with some groups, they were expecting multiple messiahs.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like a messiah who's the son of David, who's a king, a messiah who's sort of a priestly messiah who was going to restore the temple and the priesthood to its proper worship, sort of purify it.

And the.

Kingly Messiah was more focused on basically getting rid of the Romans, but in a broader sense, removing Israel or Judea from an era of foreign oppressors. Right. To have its own independent kingdom again.

So all of that was sort of about, well, what was the messianic expectation when you said the word Messiah to a first century Jewish person? What was in their head? Right. So that was. Yeah, yeah.

So I was approaching it from one angle. And the. What we're Doing tonight is coming from a different angle, as you said. So because. Right. When the New Testament authors.

And that's including like the authors of the gospels, but also St. Paul, St. James. Right. St. Jude.

St. Peter, when they write.

The documents that become the New Testament, the key claim that every one of those documents is making, that it's based on. The key idea. Right. From which everything else flows, is that Jesus is the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, almost all John's Gospel ends particularly, you know, these are written that you may believe that Jesus is. Is the Messiah, that Jesus is the Christ.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And all the letters within the first several words have Jesus Christ. And we hear that so much. You know, there are literally people out there who thinks, Think that's like Jesus's last name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like his parents were Joseph and Mary Christ. And then he was.

At one point in the past, when I was teaching a high school Sunday school class, I had a student ask me what Jesus middle name was because they had that presupposition.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so I gave the whole explanation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's. That's a title that means the Messiah. That's not his last name. And the response to me was, no, no, I know it starts with an H.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they ended up kind of telling on their parents. But yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, you know, maybe they're just. Maybe they're, you know, messianics, as they call them. So they're calling them, you know, hamashiach.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, There we go. There we go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, I want to think it was the Hebrew definite article.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go. Right. I want to think the best of everybody.

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so that every time you see.

Every time you see in an English New Testament Jesus Christ, you should, what you should think in your head, what that's actually saying is Jesus the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so that claim gets made early and often in every, every text. Right.

And so what do they mean when they say that?

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

Somebody may immediately say, well, all those things you said in the other episode that they were expecting about the Messiah, they were just saying, that's Jesus. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But a bunch of those things Jesus didn't do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And there's some at that time. There's some he hasn't even quite done yet. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So Jesus didn't overthrow the Romans.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Romans were still around. In fact, the Romans became more brutal and destroyed Jerusalem. Right.

He didn't go and restore the priesthood in the temple. Right. On this earth, like the physical building.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Didn't get rid of the Sadducees the Romans did, but not in the way the Messiah was supposed to.

And they weren't saying, well, okay, there's this, there's this checklist of messianic expectations. And well, we got the majority of these checked off from Jesus so that he. He must be the Messiah. Right. And, and they very much did not think of it in terms of.

Jesus fulfilling a list of prophecies in the Old Testament. Let me expand on that for a minute.

Because, yeah, this is a problem in Christian apologetics. I know a lot of people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I was just saying we should say, by the way, just to head off all the people that are throwing whatever against the wall. We're not saying that Jesus did not fulfill those prophecies. No, not saying that. No, no, he did.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What I'm going to say is, right.

If a Jewish person.

Says to you, name one prophecy of the Old Testament that Jesus uniquely fulfills, you're not going to be able to come up with.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

One.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That'S going to satisfy him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. I mean, it's not like they haven't had a chance to read the thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, but you're going to say, well, see, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Lots of people born in Bethlehem.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Lots of people did that too. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, that's not how Old Testament prophecy works. Right? Right. And it's, it's not even like, well, okay, yeah, lots of people did each of those individual things.

But we're going to ball up a whole bunch and say, see, Jesus did all these things.

Right.

And then the skeptical person is going to look at you and say, yeah, that's confirmation bias because he didn't overthrow the Romans. He didn't restore the physical temple. He didn't da da, da, da, da, da, da. Right. So that's not how prophecy works.

Right? That's not how. That's not how prophecy works. Jesus does fulfill every prophecy about the Messiah. Right. But prophecy doesn't work in that sort of specific prediction. Check it off the list way. And we've talked about that before on the show.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So nobody should be too shocked.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Major sub theme of this entire program.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But don't take that bait is what I'm saying.

And also it's important, sorry, preterists, that they were not saying, oh, hey, that whole Messiah thing, Jesus took care of that, so don't worry about it anymore.

Right. And that's part of this incorrect view of prophecy. Like, oh, that prophecy is fulfilled. Okay, forget about it.

Okay, it's done. Right.

That's not what they meant either because. Because Jesus is the Messiah is what they're saying. Not he was not. He was the Messiah. And therefore this Messiah stuff is over. He is the Messiah.

But by saying he is the Messiah, they were also not saying he will be the Messiah.

Right? They were not just saying he will be the Messiah. What do I mean by that? Well, we've talked on the show before, in the Messiah episode and elsewhere, that there is within the Hebrew scriptures this idea that the Messiah would come and that the Messiah would return and that there is some period of time in between.

Right. That.

For example, probably the locus classicus for this is Psalm 110, 109 in the Greek, which, as we've mentioned before on the show probably several times, is the most quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament that talks about the Messiah reigning in the midst of his enemies. Right. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies the footstool of your feet. Right. So that there is this period where the Messiah reigns in the midst of his enemies. We talked about the long time in Daniel. There's a bunch of places, and the Messiah ultimately returns to judge the living and the dead. Right. The day of the Lord.

The Messiah judges the living and the dead. But they weren't just saying, Jesus is going to be the Messiah when he comes back. They weren't just saying, oh yeah, he didn't do some of that stuff the first time he was here. He's going to do that stuff later when he comes back.

Right. That's not what they're saying. They're saying he is the Messiah. And they started saying this about him.

Pretty early on, his disciples, right.

St. Peter in particular.

Before he had died, before he had risen, right. Before they even understood. Right. St. Peter identifies Jesus as the Messiah and then argues with him about whether he's going to die or not. Right. So clearly that element he still doesn't understand, but he's still identifying Jesus as the Messiah for some reason. And so the New Testament texts, whether we're talking about the Gospels that are narrating Jesus life and ministry and then portraying him as the Messiah.

Or we're talking about, in the epistles that are speaking from a different vantage point, describing, but describing who Jesus is, what he does, what he has done, what he will do, right. They are also framing him as the Messiah.

Messiah is his identity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is. Is the claim that's being made.

And so without having done those things, they still make this, this identification. So what is It. What is it that they saw.

That caused them to make this conclusion?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. And that's what our episode is about tonight.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yes. So this may be a new record. We're this far into an episode and we haven't even started the episode.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, we've already revealed what it's really all about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. We're just disambiguating the topic.

Right. So that's what we're going to be talking about. And we're going to be talking about three main things that they identify about Jesus. And conveniently, this show has three halves.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because as Aristotle told us, everything that comes in threes is perfect.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That'S where we're going. That's where we're going tonight. And so.

For the rest of this first half, we're going to be talking about the first one of these things. And that is that they came to see Jesus as the Messiah because they saw that Jesus embodied Israel, the people of Israel. Yeah. The experience, the historical experience of Israel was embodied in and by Jesus as a person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You don't hear this talked about very much, Jesus as living out the story of Israel in himself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. But this is especially, for example, St. Matthew's gospel. You're not going to get it all if you don't get this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And you're not going to understand what he's doing with Old Testament quotes. I mean, right off the bat, right. You get things in St. Matthew's gospel like Herod starts to murder all of the children under 2 years old from in and around Bethlehem. Right.

So.

The saints Joseph, Saint Joseph and the Theotokos flee with Christ to Egypt. And then after they hear Herod dies, they come back and St Matthew says, as it is written, out of Egypt I have called my son.

And if you're a modern person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Look at that and go.

Hold on a second. And you flip back into the Old Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This is Hosea 11.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And you say, wait, this is talking about Israel. This is talking about God bringing Israel out of Egypt, like in the Exodus.

This is talking about Jesus going to Egypt for a little while and then coming back.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then if you're a conservative modern person, you say, no, Hosea was talking about Jesus going to Egypt and coming back. It's not about Israel. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, all you have to do is read the second verse in that chapter to know that it definitely is about Israel. Right. Like it says, you know, when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. And then the more they were called, the more they went away. They kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols. That's not Jesus.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Or his mother or his brother.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So this is very clear. Right. So. And this is not St. Matthew just being goofy and taking things radically out of context.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's trying to communicate Jesus in his life is embodying, recapitulating.

Experiencing the experience of Israel. Right. Because why did Israel go into Egypt? Israel was brought into Egypt through Joseph to save the family from a famine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then once that danger was well over, God brought Israel out of Egypt. So in the same way.

Jesus in his infancy, as Israel was in their infancy, is protected by going into Egypt, but then is brought back out of. Is brought back out of Egypt.

This is what's going on with Christ's temptation.

In the desert. He goes out of the desert for 40 days and 40 nights.

And this is. And there he's tempted or tested. Right. And those verbs that are used of Jesus, a lot of people go down these psychological weird trails with this. Like, no, Jesus was actually tempted, Right. Like he thought about doing bad things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No.

There are whole weird heretical theologies from the 19th century based on trying to figure that out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is. These are the same verbs that are used. Right. The same verbs that are used to describe what happens with Israel for the 40 years in the desert, the 40 years in the wilderness, there they were tested.

And if you've read your Torah, your Pentateuch, then you know that Israel failed and that whole generation died in the desert.

Whereas Jesus has the parallel experience, but succeeds.

Right? But succeeds. He is tested, gives glory to God, does not worship other gods. Right.

Is dependent on God for food and water, like the manna and the water. Remember Israel grumbled and said they were brought out there to die and all this, Right? So the temptations, quote, unquote, that Jesus deals with from the devil are not random.

They are. They're all the things that Israel fell into, Right. In that same experience. Right. But so Jesus re. Embodies that, but successfully, but faithfully to God. Right.

We just not that long ago had a theophany episode, right? And we talked about in the hymnography and in the Old Testament readings how Christ passing through the Jordan was connected to Joshua leading the people through the Jordan, which parted.

In front of them, Right. As they came into the land in order to conquer it. So Christ shares that experience as he comes back into the land. We've talked about. I guess we have to mention giants once per episode.

Some people think it's all we ever talk about. So if we don't mention it at least once per episode, like, those people would be proven wrong. And we can't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We don't. Yeah, we don't want them to be wrong.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, what next do we do an episode where we don't mention giants? Next we're going to start quoting church fathers or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're not always mentioning Enoch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, you blew it. You just did. Anyway. Oh, dang it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This many days since Enoch was mentioned on the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But we've mentioned before how the view, at least of regardless of what you want to think, think what you will, but the view of the common Jewish people of the first century was that the unclean spirits, the demons that are possessing people, who Christ was casting out of people, that those were the spirits of the dead giants. Meaning they were the same enemies.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, that was the belief at the time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Again, you can think whatever you want about that belief. We're not saying that this is what the scripture says or this is what the church teaches. No, just saying.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so the prominence in the first three gospels of exorcisms is part of this. Again, portraying Christ's experience as parallel. Right. With that of Israel. But again, Israel, when they went into the land, did not take all the land they were supposed to take.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. They did not fight off all the giants.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They did not get rid of the giant clans as they were supposed to. Right. They didn't do what they were supposed to. But Christ does. Right. Jesus successfully does these things. And then even in St. Matthew's gospel, another example, the way he frames the Sermon on the Mount and why it's called that. Right. He goes up on a mountain, which wouldn't have been a mountain. It would have been a hill. Right. Based on where it is geographically.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, that just proves it all took place in Lithuania, because the word for mountain and the word for hill is exactly the same word. Kolnas. So I'm just saying you're going down.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This whole Joseph Smith Eden is in Jackson, Missouri, thing now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, you know, the Vilnius used to be called Jerusalem of the north.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There you go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So I'm just putting that out there. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. A little bit more of a hill than a mountain. Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Right. But it's framed as a mountain. Why? Well, he's teaching from a mountain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like Moses, people gathered around them. Right. Like Israel received the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, in a real sense, like, we're going to keep talking about this, but in a real sense, Jesus does what Israel was always supposed to do. Jesus succeeds where Israel, because he is Israel in this sense.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. He is embodying Israel.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This is Christ is the ultimate triumph of Israel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this is also true. If we look at the historical experience of Israel as it's shown to us in the Hebrew Scriptures in the Old Testament, right. We see that the experience of Israel was also profoundly an experience of suffering.

Suffering in slavery in Egypt, suffering at the hands of his brothers. Right. We see this kind of literally with Joseph, but right. Later on, you have the Syro Ephraimite war, you have these clashes between. You have the Israelite civil war that's related in the last few chapters of Judges. Right. That.

You have various persecutions of sort of the remnant, the faithful remnant of Israel gets persecuted by the faithless Israelites, like in the case of the prophet Elijah. Right. You also, of course, have. See Israel suffering at the hands of the foreign nations who attack, who invade, who harass. Right. Who try to conquer.

But the key here, right, because of course, we see Christ's experience also as one of the profound suffering, right. Of suffering, rejection, alienation, mocking. Right. Ultimately, well, several attempts at killing him before actually he gets betrayed and.

Suffers and dies. Right. Is that the arc of.

The Hebrew Scriptures is about Israel suffering because of her sins.

The reason the Israelite civil war happens in Judges is because of the idolatry and immorality that Israel has fallen into, where they begin to turn on each other.

The division of the kingdom into the northern and southern kingdom is a result of Solomon's S.

When the Assyrians come and wipe out the northern kingdom of Israel, it's for their apostasy and idolatry and sinfulness.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's all very explicit in the scriptures.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. This is. Read the Old Testament stuff. This is not some deep exegetical ledger domain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This is not an interpretation that you have to apply. The Old Testament interprets this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. This is just the narrative. Yeah. When Babylon comes and conquers Judah and takes them into exile, it's because of their sin. Right. Again and again and again is suffering for Israel suffering for her sins. The difference here is Jesus, when he suffers, it's not because of his sins, because he doesn't have any.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so he's suffering for the people's sins.

He's suffering for Israel's sins.

And this embodiment of Israel in this way, in these ways we've been talking about is.

Again part and parcel of why they look at Jesus and say, this is the Messiah because he is Israel, and so he is Israel's Messiah. But this goes even deeper than that. And to kind of get at how deep it goes, or to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole or however we want to frame it.

We'Re going to use. There are a lot of texts from the Old Testament we could read on this. Right. But we're going to read one in particular, in part, because I just. It's one I really like.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, this is a big favorite. Big crowd favorite, I think.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And I don't think Father Andrew is going to read it, like, the Russian way where he goes up a note every.

Every line. But, I mean, you're free to do that if you want to, Father.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You can find that on YouTube. Not my voice, mind you.

I actually think there's one of Father Sergius Halvorson.

Doing this on the youtubes somewhere, who was, for one semester, one of my homiletics professors when I was at Saint Icons, and he decided you had enough of Saint Tikons and went back to Saint Vlad's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so you. Yours, I think, will be more in the style of plain reading.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes, Correct. Right. There will be no singing tonight. Okay. So, yes, this is Ezekiel, chapter 37, verses 1 through 14. The hand of the Lord was upon me. And he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones. And he led me around among them. And behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley. And behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, o Lord God. You know, Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, o dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you. And you shall live. And you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, Behold, a rattling. And the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them. And flesh had come upon them and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, prophesy to the breath. Prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the Lord, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet an exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say our bones are dried up and our hope is lost. We are indeed cut off. Therefore I prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord. Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my spirit within you and you shall live. And I will place in you your own land, place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have spoken and I will do it, declares the Lord. And pretty much every Lord there is actually Yahweh there. Yahweh, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Then you will know that I am Yahweh.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so.

This is Ezekiel, of course, is.

A prophet during the exile.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So at the time, Ezekiel is exercising his prophetic ministry.

The northern tribes of Israel are gone from the face of the earth.

Right. 150 years before this.

Wiped out by the Assyrians, never to come back. Right. Population distributed through the Assyrian empire through intermarriage, gone.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At the time Ezekiel is saying this, Judah is in exile in Babylon, but even when they're allowed to eventually return under Cyrus.

They'Re still going to be under foreign domination. They're going to return to become a province of the Persian Empire, which is then going to end up being a province of the Seleucid Empire, which is then going to end up briefly being an independent province, and then once again, right back to province of the Roman Empire.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So they're under foreign domination. So the Israelites, over which David was king.

The paradigm for the Messiah, the Israel, over which David is king, is dead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Long gone.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The dream is dead.

And there's no.

Sensible, visible, non. Completely miraculous way that it could come.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Back.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And be restored.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not in its fullness.

Right. There could be a remnant of it, but, like.

This is not going to actively come back again. And so the imagery that God uses here, of course, is very pointed. Right. It's not just like, oh, it's like you're dead. No. As Israel. Israel was dead.

And the promise here is that Israel is going to rise again.

Rise from the Dead.

This is going to require the miraculous power of God, obviously. Right. God is the one who could do this. The fact that he has there. Then you will know that I am Yahweh. Then you know that I am the one who causes things to be that weren't.

Right. Israel is going to be remade. Right. It has died and is going to rise again.

One of the sort of curious things that you find in the Gospels and that you find in St. Paul's epistles.

And in summary of some of the apostles preaching in Acts, even in the New Testament.

Are statements that, you know, Paul goes to a synagogue, St. Paul goes to a synagogue in the book of Acts, and he argues from the Scriptures that the Messiah must die and rise again.

Right.

And you may have noticed if you go back to that episode where we talked about the Messiah and Second Temple Judaism, that one on anybody's list, really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. I thought the Christ was supposed to, you know, live forever. Live forever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What do you mean he's going to be lifted up? What do you mean, he's going to be crucified? Wait a minute.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is. I mean, St. Paul confirms this. Right. He says, you know, the message of the cross is a stumbling block to the Jews. They're like, oh, he's the Messiah. Oh, well, where is he now? Crucified by the Romans? Huh? Right. That's not. Yeah, right. That's how false messiahs died in the first century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They got crucified by the Romans. Right.

So this was. This was not on anybody's list. And yet the apostles were making a case from the Hebrew scriptures that the Hebrew Scriptures said that the Messiah would die and rise again. And I think this is the place where we find this, this is the way that we have to understand this, that Jesus as the Messiah embodies Israel. Israel died.

Israel died because of her sins.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Jesus dies with no sins, so he is able to die for her sins.

And then when Jesus rises again as the Messiah, he's the first fruits. He's the beginning of that promised resurrection.

And restoration.

And so Jesus participates not only in the suffering that Israel historically suffered, but also in the death of Israel.

In order that.

The people of God could participate in the new life that comes at the resurrection. And just to head off.

Because I do not yet have that better class of critics that I crave.

Right, yes. There's a lot more to say about Jesus, death and resurrection. We're not saying that's all.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, of course. Right, yeah.

It's kind of sad to Me, I mean, I get it, I get it, right? Because I felt this way at one point in my life when I was a lot younger, frankly, that.

You see something really interesting, you want to understand what's in the scripture, you get an answer like, okay, that's, that's it, good, I got it down now, you know, but.

If orthodox Christianity is the truth, and I believe that it is uniquely the truth, then shouldn't it be so full.

That you can never sort of master it, you know, that you can never get it all down like you, you know.

Shouldn'T it be so full that it rises to the level of and beyond the level of human dignity in every possible way? You know, that it's a bottomless, bottomless well. So, yeah, there's so many things one can say about the death and resurrection of Jesus. And I mean, even Pascha itself says so many of them, but still just begins in some ways.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But this is one of them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is one of them for sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is one of them that maybe we don't emphasize enough. And yes, it's true. It's not just, I mean, it's theologically true. Right. Any theological system that explains everything about God and that you can contain in your human head is wrong.

And probably heretical, but at least wrong.

But it's not just true theologically, it's true of the scriptures.

Right. I say this as somebody who got a PhD in this.

There is not a point.

That any human ever reaches where they can say they understand the Scriptures in a comprehensive way. Right. It doesn't happen. Right. It doesn't happen. And.

That'S not just because of our nature as humans. It's so on one level, because of our nature as humans. Right. As you just mentioned. Right. You were a younger man once.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

When I wore a younger man's clothes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I was always old. But.

But.

The way in which a 21 year old, well, a 15 year old, a 21 year old, a 30 year old, a 45 year old, and then moving on, a 60 year old, a 75 year old.

Who spends time in the Scriptures, hears the same scriptures, is very different, not contradictory. It's not just about like, oh, I understood it wrong before and now I understand it correctly. Right. But God meets you through the Scriptures at different points in your life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And you're able to absorb different things at different points. And often the stuff you absorb later builds on what you absorbed earlier.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And you're different. And.

The Scriptures are not a magic riddle box.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay. They aren't like opaque.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Some of them are difficult. Right. I'm not saying that there aren't difficult parts of the Scriptures. Okay.

But, you know, a guy stuck in Tulsa, I don't know why I'm picking on Tulsa, but a guy stuck in Tulsa overnight who flips open the Gideon Bible in his hotel room because he can't get to sleep and reads the parable of the Good Samaritan could get the message that he needs to love his neighbor. Yeah, right. That's not like, oh, no, I need to find some church father to explain this to me. Right? You can get it. Right.

But at the same time, someone who spent their whole life studying the Scriptures and is now in their 80s can pick up and read the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And have it strike them in all new ways.

And interact with their experiences in life in different ways.

Where they learn from it, too.

That's how Scripture works.

And so in most cases. Right. We'll peel back a meta layer here on Lord of Spirits. Right.

Most of our episodes.

I want to say all, but who knows, right? There might be one that's different, but most of our episodes are essentially a trajectory.

Right.

A line. We draw a line, a through line through the scriptures on some topic.

Right. And through tradition on some topic.

But if you think about a sphere, how many possible lines you could have go through that sphere.

And none of those lines would be contradicting any of the other ones. Some of them would intersect with each other. Some of them would run parallel to each other for a certain distance.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But.

You can keep doing that forever.

So what we're doing tonight is three closely aligned trajectories that all have to do with what it means that Jesus is the Messiah. And this is the first one, this idea that Jesus embodies Israel and Israel's experience.

And even the death and then resurrection of Israel, the restoration, the destruction and restoration of God's people.

And the people who traveled with him and ate with him and talked with him, even though they're interacting with him as this human.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's how they're interacting with him. That's how they first encountered Him. They see this about him, and this is one of the things that causes them to conclude this is the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, pretty cool. Well, we've still got two more halves to this episode, so we're going to take our first break. And we'll be right back with the Lord of Spirits.

Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls. On the next part of the Lord of Spirits, give them a call at 855-23-723. That's 855 AF radio.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Forge enduring connections with Orthodox brothers, strengthen your faith, be encouraged and challenge yourself at the first ever Ancient Faith Men's Retreat. The retreat features four engaging speakers, daily services and Sunday Divine Liturgy fellowship with like minded Orthodox men and more at the beautiful Antiochian Village Conference center in Bolivar, Pennsylvania, Thursday, August 22 through Sunday, August 25. Speakers include Hiramunk Basil of Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, West Virginia, Fr. John Strickland, author of the paradise and Utopia book series Father John Oliver, the host of the AFR podcast Hearts and Minds and Fr. Michael Mark Antony, priest at St. John Chrysostom Orthodox Church Church in Nashville, Tennessee. For more information and to register, please visit store.ancientfaith.com events.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855 AF radio.

Hey, welcome back, everybody. If you're just joining us, we are talking about how it is that people who knew Jesus in person realized that he was the Messiah, not just that he had fulfilled a list of things that were prophesied about him in the Old Testament, although of course he did that and is doing that, but how they recognized him as the Messiah. And in the first half we talked about Jesus as embodying or recapitulating Israel and Israel's story. And so we've got two other ways that Jesus embodies elements of Israel and we're covering each one of those in these three halves. So pretty straightforward episode, I think.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Wait a minute. Way to recapitulate the first half, right? And just a few sentence.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's funny, you know, to use both embody and recapitulate because that's head and body right there. Because. Yeah, you know, see, I didn't have.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The etymology jingle going head, shoulders, knees and toes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, there's that great phrase, I can't remember which work it's in now, but there's that great phrase from St. Augustine in Latin, totus Christus caput et corpus, the whole Christ, head and body. And of course he's as far as I recall, he's talking about the church when he mentions the body there. But yeah, the whole Christ, head and body.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I feel like we need more songs with hand motions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's true. I mean.

Yeah, this. You know, maybe this is something that the Orthodox church could learn from vacation Bible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, no, I just meant in the world. Oh, in the world in general, yes. Like, I think pop songs needed not dance crazes. Right. Like TikTok dances. I think that's passe now, especially since TikTok lost all their music rights. Just hand motions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You are an award winning ballroom dancer, though. I would love to see you start your own TikTok channel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, you can't use any music now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's probably some public domain.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is a lot of ballroom dancing music that is in the public domain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes, exactly. I'm sure there's some Strauss or whatever that you could put on.

Just put that out there. This is what the people want. Father Stephen.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I doubt it, somehow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Think of the Merchant.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm not big on the selling the merch.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I know, I know. All right, what are we doing in this?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What are we doing in general?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What are we doing? How have we come to this? Who am I? What am I sitting here at work?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What am I doing anyway?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Existential crisis in the middle of an episode.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, it's about time. We are in our late 40s, so we should be having some existential crises, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So this.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's a whole bunch of things that I can't do because it would be a midlife crisis.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It would be a little too cliche.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like, I don't know if I've talked about this. Like, I have this firm rule that if you don't have any tattoos by the time you're 40, you cannot get any tattoos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Fair.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you have gotten tattoos before you're 40, you could keep getting tattoos your whole life. Yeah, but if you hit 40 with zero tattoos and then you start getting tattoos, it's a midlife crisis and it's just kind of sad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And people look at you kind of funny, nodding knowingly. See, because this is radio, so they can't see you doing that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I think this is. There are a number of things. Like you can't buy a sports car, Right. Like after a certain age, if you're a dude.

Right. Like, women have to be careful with their hairstyles once they reach a certain age. You don't want to get the midlife crisis thing going.

Middle aged is the worst of all possible worlds. You can't get up off the floor. You don't get senior discounts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Anyway. Okay, now that we're done commiserating.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, welcome back, kids.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Back to the Show. Yes. Whippersnappers, get off my lawn.

We're going to talk about here in the second half, we're going to be talking about.

The way in which.

Jesus as the Messiah embodies the Torah.

And that may already sound crazy to some people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And I say good.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

And I say it to you. Good.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So again, here, like in the first half, we have to go back and revisit a couple of concepts. Not full on review, but revisit a couple of concepts. Right. And that's, you know, we're using the term Torah very deliberately here, rather than other possibilities.

In parts, try to break up connotations. So we've talked before on the show about how the word Torah in Hebrew means something like teaching.

And that got translated in the third century in the Trans Septuagint, which is a translation of the torah as nomos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

3Rd century B.C. by the way, everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

3Rd century B.C nomos. See, my interest extends not that far into A.D. so I just assume.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, nomos meaning kind of way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, Nomos kind of was an idea that included, like a whole way of life, a lot of things that we would file under culture, manners, mores. Right. A whole sort of way of life, a way of being in the world. It was a very sort of rich term.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's their way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And then when St. Jerome chose Lex to translate that lex in Latin had a richer meaning, closer to nomos.

But ended up coming into English as law.

And then the term law even got kind of devalued in English to the point that now when we hear the word law, even when it's used like in the New Testament, we think of, like, commandments like law or legal codes. Yeah, yeah. And it's very obvious that the Torah includes, for example, the Book of Genesis, which doesn't include any of that.

And the narrative portions of Exodus and the narrative portions of the other. The other books of the Torah. Right. And so.

We'Re using Torah here because what we're talking about is more than just rules. And that immediately becomes important, that idea that it's not just rules, commandments, laws. When we talk about what it means to fulfill the Torah. Right.

And we've talked about in the past, Right. That the way a lot of people use fulfill the law or interpret fulfill the law when it occurs in the New Testament is basically get rid of.

Right. So it's used as this weird sort of linguistic ledger domain where Christ says he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. So someone will say, oh, see, so we don't follow this, that, and the other from the Torah anymore. Right. You say to them, but Christ didn't come to abolish the law. They're like, no, he fulfilled it. And the result is the same. We can ignore it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Now we're using the word fulfill.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it sounds nicer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We mean abolish.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, it sounds nicer. So it's just sort of this trick like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not firing you, we're letting you go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Good luck in your future.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Laid off.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

And relatedly then, some people will interpret the say, well, Jesus fulfills.

The law to mean, oh, well, he kept the rules.

Right. He didn't break any of the rules, which. Okay, true, right. Jesus did keep the commandments. Right. All of them. But.

That'S a very base level of what we're talking about when we're talking about him fulfilling the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Torah is way bigger than commit the commandments.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And so the actual meaning of the word fulfill, as we've said before, is sort of right there in it, and that's that it needs to be filled full. Right. Filled up to overflowing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And I should say, by the way, that if you understand this correctly, then you can start to see why it is, for instance, that there are a number of commandments even, and ordinances and specific things that God tells Israel to do in the Torah that are said in the text itself to be forever. Right. This shall be, you know, an ordinance forever. Right. And yet you'd be like, well, wait a minute, nobody's doing that anymore. In what sense is that forever? You know, like, Christians don't do that. Even modern rabbinic Jews don't do that thing, whatever it might be, especially some of the sacrificial stuff. But if you understand how Jesus is the one who embodies and fulfills the Torah, then you start to see why it's forever.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so that's part of explaining what that means. Yeah, because that's a question I at least get a lot.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, okay, so fulfill means fills up to overflowing. How does Jesus fill the Torah up to overflowing?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What does that actually mean? And so that's part of what we're going to be getting at here.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In this half.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so what we have presented in the Torah in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, right. We have presented is a way of life, a way of being in the world. That's why nomos was a good translation. Right.

So that takes different forms.

So in Genesis, in the other narrative material, where we're talking about the lives of people, we're seeing a way of life described narratively and that's described both positively and negatively.

Right. So there are positive descriptions of things that conform to that way of life, like Isaac and Rebecca's marriage.

Right. There are also descriptions of things that deviate from that way of life, like various incidents of polygamy. And you see in those narratives how that goes wrong. Right. How that goes badly.

The fruit and the results that that produces. Right. Both of those are ways of using narrative to describe.

A correct way of life. Right. You have, on the one hand, exemplars, you have models to follow, on the other hand, you have cautionary tales. Right. This is what happens when you go the other way. And it should go without saying, and I'm sure we've said this on the show before. Right. But a lot of people have problems with this. A lot of our atheist friends have problems with this.

Just because the Bible describes something happening, that doesn't mean the Bible is saying that it's good.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. And you can tell that people are trying to make that claim when they talk about, for instance, quote unquote, biblical marriage.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's often where the thing that they'll throw out. Well, let's look at. You want to talk about biblical marriage? Well, look at all these marriages in the Old Testament.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Polygamy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Jesus. God didn't say to do that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes. And in fact, if you read the narrative, it goes horribly wrong.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. It's not going to work out well for you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like Deuteronomy says the king should not multiply wives. David then has a whole bunch of wives. Look what happens in David's family.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And if, again, all you have to do is read it out of the service. David says all of this stuff that's happening in my family is because of my sin.

David says that in the text of scripture. Right.

Not. Not even, you know, any deep level of interpretation. So, yeah. So both of these occur. Right. When you read about what happens with Jacob's family because of being married to Leah and Rachel and having children with two of his servants. Right. And everything that unfolds, you see, oh, polygamy is bad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like this is what any sensible person would conclude. Right.

But so this, this way of life. Right. And we see usually it's in the life of the same person, like in the patriarchal narratives. Right. You see where Abraham does. Right. And Where Abraham goes wrong.

We see both, and we see Abraham grow through those experiences and grow closer to God by following a way of life.

Commandments obviously fit into that in a very obvious way. So commandments.

Mitzvot in Hebrew, give you the fences. So if we're talking about a way of life, a way, we're talking about a road, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

A road.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You're going to travel down.

One road as opposed to another road, right? This is the good road that leads to the place you want to go, right. One of the ways that you're kept on the road is if there are established fences.

Without fences, without any kind of barriers or markers at the edges of the road, you might have a muddy track. You can't tell is the road continuing this way or that way.

Right. You might get lost, you might wander off the road. If you have these clear markers of where the edges of the road are, that won't happen. They help keep you on the road. That's how the commandments function. Right? They're the borders. They're the edges.

That you don't want to wander past.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is really the same way that.

Theological dogma works in the Orthodox Church. By the way.

The word dogma in Greek refers to a boundary marker for somebody's property.

So the statements of the ecumenical council are putting in these fences, these markers of the edges. You don't want to go further than this in this direction or further than that in that direction. Right. You want to stay within these boundaries that mark off the way of salvation. But this is built on how the Torah structures it. Right.

And so.

Within those, whether it's. Whether it's commandments, whether it's narrative elements, right? Whatever. Whatever genre we're talking about, what's really being laid out is a way of understanding the world, a way of seeing the world, a way of reasoning about the world.

And that's obvious. That obviously includes ethical or moral reasoning.

What should I do in this situation? What is the right thing to me? What will. What is the thing to do in this situation that will please God, that will bring me closer to God, but it includes a lot more, right? How do we see other people?

How do we see events in the world? How do we understand things that happen to us and that we encounter in our lives? It is this overarching framework.

Of how to see the world, interact with the world, be in the world, travel through the world toward God. And so when we talk about Jesus embodying that, hopefully that idea starts to make a lot more sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That when his disciples, when other people encounter Jesus during his ministry.

They see that he embodies that way of life, that he embodies that way of seeing the world, that way of seeing others, that way of communicating, that way of teaching.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

You know, an awful lot of the Gospels. Right. An awful lot of the Gospels is Jesus teaching.

And I know there's people out there like, yeah, right.

But this is counterintuitive from a lot of theological perspectives.

Right. So I'll give an example back during the last quest for the historical Jesus, may it rest in peace and never.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Is that still a thing? No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The third question of historical Jesus is now over. We don't need a fourth. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Someone has finally dropped the ring into.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's over. But rest in pieces. Right.

During that, when you would read these books, as was my want.

Didn'T matter. Didn't matter who it was, these groups didn't matter if it was Crossing or Robert Funk or Marcus Borg or any of these guys.

Bart Ehrman's brief dalliance with it before he moved on to other things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Even.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

NT rights stuff.

Which is much better than most of that other stuff. I just named.

Any of that stuff. Something almost all of them would say, interestingly, was the Gospels are basically.

Extended introductions to the passion narratives.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And they would say.

In any given Gospel, about one third of it is passion narrative.

Now, that's less than the majority, allow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Me to point out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But.

Coming from a particular theological perspective which predominates in Western European countries, people get mad now when we talk about Western things in the west, but west predominates in Western European countries and their former colonies.

That's the important part.

Right. Jesus dying and rising again. That's the important part. And yeah, we read about his birth at Christmas and then there's this other stuff in between.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean.

This is the world of people for whom the only feasts on the church calendar are Christmas and Easter.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so this really important part is the death and resurrection of Christ. And that stuff before that, that's really just building up for that. It's like Jesus predicting that and, you know, like that kind of thing.

And then there are all kinds of variants of this. Right. So you've got certain types of dispensationalism that say all that teaching of Jesus isn't for Christians.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah, I know. I. About that. I'm like, wait, what? What?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, so that's not even for Christians. So you can ignore that. Just go straight to death and resurrection, because that is for Us. Right. Et cetera, et cetera. So there's various versions of this, but that's sort of the main event. Right. And this other stuff is sort of. And, you know, you've got certain species of Protestantism where, you know, we don't want to look at that stuff. Jesus is teaching too much because it might start looking like works. Righteousness.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's telling you to do good things and not bad things, and that's the worst thing you can do as a Christian.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So there's all kinds of reasons why it gets sidelined, but it's most of the Gospels.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. How about. It's all important.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And if you're on any kind of lectionary. I'm not just talking about the Orthodox lectionary now. Orthodox lectionary, Roman Catholic lectionary, Protestant lectionaries. Right. How much of the year are you reading from Jesus teaching? And how much of the year are you reading about his death and resurrection?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So this is in the structure of the church's worship, too, the importance of this material, of Jesus teaching.

Now that I've gone there, let me push a little further. Jesus is teaching Torah the whole time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean.

In most ways, there's not really any new material there. Exactly.

Which is probably why so many people called him Rabbi. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the first people who identified him as the Messiah were the people who heard him teaching.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, they didn't heard him teaching. Watch him fulfilling prophecies. No, it's. It's. These are the things he says.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And no, no man ever spoke like this man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. He's. He's going in, he's answering questions. Right. And he. He's doing these things, and he's arguing with. When he's arguing with the Pharisees, he's arguing Torah with them.

Right. They come and say, why are you healing this person on the Sabbath? And he says to them, on the Sabbath, if you're. If your donkey falls in a ditch, you pull it out of the ditch. This is a human right.

He's arguing from the Torah.

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And again and again, he says to them, you guys claim to be the ones who know Torah. You're the teachers of the law. You're the teachers of Torah. You guys are the ones going out teaching Torah.

But you're not. You're not doing it. You're not living it. You don't really understand it. You don't know how to apply it to people's lives who come to you.

Right. And what everyone observes About Jesus is the opposite.

That he's living it out.

That he's explaining it, that he's teaching it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's explaining these things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

This is not. So there's this. There's this weird idea that's. There's this weird idea that. Well, there's a couple related. One of them is that Jesus somehow makes the Torah more difficult.

Right? Like, he heightens the Torah. Like, you know, when he says, you have heard it say, thou shalt not murder, but if you hate your brother, you've already murdered him in your heart. That somehow, like before Jesus said that it was okay to hate your brother in your heart as long as you didn't kill him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's a really weird way of reading the Commandments, man.

I'm pretty sure nobody.

No Jewish teacher before Jesus would have told you it's okay to hate your brother and wish him dead. Right. Like, as long as you don't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just don't touch him.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Just don't actually kill him. But otherwise it's fine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or the. You know, the other one. Right. Basically, like, you know, if you see a woman and lust after her in your heart, you know.

It'S the same as. Basically as if you committed adultery with her. Like, it's not like in the Torah, look, but don't touch was the rule.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. In fact, you remember that whole don't covet your neighbor's wife thing?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, I've heard of that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. That's in there. The same place as the thou shalt not commit adultery, in fact, just a couple verses later. Yeah, yeah. So Christ is, again, not making it more difficult. He's applying it correctly.

Right. He's talking about what it actually means. Because all that stuff. I once had somebody.

I will not name them. This is an Orthodox person. This is a member of the Orthodox clergy.

Say to me.

We don't follow the Torah anymore. We follow the commandments of Jesus to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

To which I responded, those are from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Those are literally commandments from the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if you notice the reaction, Right. We need to watch the reaction as Jesus is teaching. Right. When Jesus says these things about the Torah, the people look at him and say, this must be the Messiah because of how he understands and teaches the Torah. And his enemies, the ones who don't like him and who don't think he's the Messiah, what happens they're put to shame because they can't argue with him.

Because he understands the Torah better than they do. Has something to do with him giving it, but we'll get there.

He understands it better than they do. That's what's going on in all these teaching sections of the Gospels. And it's going on right there on the surface.

And it doesn't just. And this embodying of the Torah doesn't just include. It does include, but it isn't just about his teaching. Christ obviously also lives that way of life as well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. He walks the walk. Yeah, we'll get more to that in a minute.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, but. Right, so, yes, Jesus does all the things that are commanded in the Torah. He doesn't do the things that are forbidden in the Torah. Right. But you look at his criticism of the Pharisees. Every time he criticizes the Pharisees, he doesn't criticize them for being wrong.

He doesn't say, oh, no, you've got this wrong.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. He calls them argue with you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hypocrites. You say the right things, but you're not living it, buddy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. You're not living it. You're not living it. That's always the criticism, Right. That Jesus is saying, understanding the Torah, understanding what God is teaching means living this out.

Not just memorizing it, not just.

Being able to make convoluted arguments about it and win arguments about it. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not just about owning the Sadducees.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. There's something to say about this in terms of Christian theology, including Orthodox theology.

Right. It's not just about memorizing canons and stuff from church councils and where to put the right preposition in your Christological statement so you're not a heretic. And then going out to own other people and win arguments. Right. That's not how theology works. You're supposed to live it out.

Right. You're supposed to live it out. And when you're actually living it out the way the saints do, that's why they're saints. They're saints because of how they live their lives.

Some of them are not formally educated. Right.

But they lived it out. And because they lived it out, they understood it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And could explain it. It doesn't work the other way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So this is now, all this that I've been saying, this episode is going to be great because I'm anticipating being called both a Judaizer and an anti Semite after that.

By some of the same people. But that's Right, but this isn't just, you know, me going on this wacky hebrophile right tack.

This is. We've fairly recently.

At least as we're doing this live broadcast, celebrated a couple of feasts in the life of the Orthodox Church. The feast of Christ circumcision, and most recently, Christ's presentation in the temple, or the meeting of the Lord in the temple when he was brought 40 days after his birth to the temple. And if you read any.

Any of the hymnography, any of the readings we've been reading.

Okay, from the Orthodox Manea, it's all about Christ keeping the Torah. It's all about Jesus keeping the Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's all over the texts. It's everywhere. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's the whole point of these feasts, right, Is to make this point to us, right. That Jesus is the one who embodies the Torah in this way. So this is not just something.

Right? That's some weird thing of mine, right?

So.

This carries over, right?

I'll go so far as to say this is where most modern people fail to understand St. Paul.

When he talks about how to live. Now, that part of St. Paul gets marginalized anyway.

In our modern world, right? There's this whole section of every one of his epistles. It usually follows him saying the word therefore.

Where he starts talking to people about how to live. And those parts get a lot less emphasis, right? Like after Romans, chapter 11, a lot of people just sort of check out.

But for him, this is where he's going with the whole letter, right? And.

He structures it based on this, based on the way in which.

Jesus embodied the Torah, right? This is how he understands the Torah relating to the Christian Life. So.

For St. Paul, there's two ways you can walk, right? And that walk. Language is important.

Because.

In Jewish circles, already in the first century A.D.

When a Pharisee like St. Paul is discussing the way people should live or answering questions as a teacher about the way people should live, as he does at his epistles all the time. Here is what you should do. You should be doing this and not doing that. Right.

That whole area of discussion within Judaism was already called halakha.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which as I just learned, I mean, I knew the word like, I knew that it was, like, about applying the Torah, you know, but it means to walk. It means to walk.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. It's from the verb to walk, the way you walk in. So, you know, St. Paul's epistles are written in Greek. So when we see the verb to walk, we don't necessarily just think of it. As a metaphor or something. And we don't make this connection, right? But for him, there are two different ways. And this is picking up on things in Proverbs, right? There's the way of wisdom, the way of foolishness, the way of life, the way of destruction.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But for St. Paul, there's two ways. There's, you can. You can walk according to the Spirit and follow the Spirit, meaning capital S. Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God, or you can walk according to the flesh.

And if you walk according to the flesh, what that means is that you are living your life in a way where you're seeking to gratify your desires.

Lust, gluttony, greed, pride, you name it, right?

That's what you're seeking to gratify.

If you're walking according to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, then you're living your life in a way that seeks to please God.

But what we see again and again.

St. Paul explicitly saying is that he's teaching walking in the way of the spirit as a positive way of living.

And saying that if you live in this way and you follow the Spirit.

Then those guardrails from the commandments, it's not that they're not there anymore, Right. But it's that you won't need them. You will stay on the path. You're not going to be bouncing off of them. Right.

So he lists the fruits, fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Right. He says against such things, there is no law. There's no commandment in the Torah that you will violate if your life is filled with those things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because if you become the kind of person.

That the Torah is trying to get you to be, then you don't actually then have to, like, keep around a rule book with you. Oh, wait, I got to make sure. Like, don't. Don't, you know, kill my. Don't commit murder. Okay. Let me keep, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I gotta remember. Any murders? No, you don't have to think of. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you love your brother, you're not going to think about killing him. Right? Like, right In Romans, right. St. Paul says, right. That they need to learn to love your neighbor. He says, because the one who loves keeps the whole Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you truly love your neighbor and love God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, that's it. You've kept the whole Torah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Boom.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But you will not violate it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Yeah. You will not violate it. And one could ask then, like, well, what's the point of the Torah, then, anyway, I'm a loving person. Why do I need all that? Well, it's because, number one, let's be honest with ourselves. In many ways, we are not loving persons. Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Speak for yourself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I am speaking for myself, but I know you a little bit, too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I am a polite. But anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I. You know, I think a simile that works here is.

Being a musician, right? So when you, you know, kids, when you're first taking those first piano lessons or you're getting out that clarinet for the first time or whatever it might be.

You have to look at the keys and say, okay, when I press this one, it's A. When I press this one, it's B, C sharp, whatever, right? These together is this chord. And so you're thinking about all of it as you go. You're thinking about the structure, you're thinking about the names of everything. You're thinking about the rules. How does this work? What exactly is a key change? All this stuff. But, like, if you were to go up to Miles Davis right after he played some piece of jazz and say, okay, now what exactly were you doing just now? He probably would not have explained it in terms of all the stuff that I just said, because he mastered that a long, long time ago. He just gets up there and he plays. And what comes out is music. Right? And in a very real sense, that's how the Torah works, is it functions, as St. Paul puts it, a tutor. It's a teacher. It teaches you how to put all these things together. And then you become the person who can simply do that. And you don't have to be looking up the rules all the time. But until we're really able to play, so to speak, then we do need to have the rules. And, you know, if you make a mistake when you're playing a particular piece of music, you go back and you look at the sheet music and you say, exactly, where did I go wrong? How did I fail here? Right? So even if you do become a decent musician, you still need to be drilled with the rules every so often so that you can gain greater perfection.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right? Right. And this is how this connects to the idea of having the mind of Christ.

To see the world in this way. Right. Ultimately, what St. Paul argues is that in the way that Jesus as the Messiah, embodied the Torah.

That because we have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God dwelling in us, we can now, if we follow the Spirit, live similarly. Right. It's not imitate Christ in a wooden sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It is in an external sense. Right. It is that we will naturally. Right. Begin to learn to live that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the problem with trying to keep the Torah in his past that St. Paul identifies is that he was trying to keep it externally. He was trying to keep it as rules, just checking off the rules. And again and again he failed.

Right. Because of sin. It wasn't a problem with the Torah, it was a problem with him.

But that the Holy Spirit now dwelling within him would allow him to keep the Torah.

And if you have any doubts about how I'm reading St. Paul here, I urge you to read St. John Chrysostom's commentary on Romans where he says the same thing.

That's as much as I'm allowed to quote church fathers in an episode of Lord Experience.

Though. So I will let it go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All the new kids are not going to get these jokes, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, I also, I also, I also want to add, because we kind of glossed over it.

We have a very weird.

Mental image of Jesus a lot of the time.

Because we've gotten it from a lot of. Frankly, I'll speak for myself, growing up in the United States, bad Protestant art and movies about Jesus, man.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Are you dissing the flannel graph?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, not the flatograph. I'm talking about the illustrations in, in those Bible storybooks and stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

He's always got like a white one piece tunic and then a red sash.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What is that always about?

That's.

I don't. I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But for the record, when we say Jesus kept the commandments, those were the commandments about dress too.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And about what he ate.

Jesus was Jewish. Sorry to break it to you Greeks.

Right. He dressed as a Jewish man was supposed to. He presented himself as a Jewish man was supposed to. He ate right. As the Torah said one should eat. Right. He kept the whole Torah. So. Right. When he, for example, criticizes the Pharisees for their tassels, he doesn't criticize them for wearing tassels at the edge of their garments. They were supposed to do that in the Torah. He criticized them for making the tassels long and the phylacteries broad and big, meaning doing it in a way that was clearly intended to attract other people's attention and to make you look pious to other people. That's what he criticized.

Right. Because that was a hypocritical way of keeping Torah. That's not why God gave the Torah, was so that you could make yourself look really pious to other people and become proud. Right.

But yeah, keep that in mind. Right. Does your mental image of Jesus look remotely Jewish? If not, probably need some correction.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But yeah.

Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, the point of, of all of this.

Is, you know, and we talked about this a little bit, and I should say extensively, actually, in the but we have the mind of Christ episode, you know, and, and that is to gain this sense of understanding, interpreting, applying the Torah the way that Christ himself does. And as we've said in this, this half, as he embodies like he is, in a sense, the living Torah, you know. So. All right. Well, we're going to take our second and final break, and we'll be right back with the third half of the Lord of Spirits podcast.

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Neither do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and it gives light unto all that are in the house. Matthew 5.

Ancient Faith's Lampstand Institute is an introductory media training forum for Orthodox Christians aged 18 to 23 who are interested in learning skills in digital media and applying them to the service of the church. From July 18th to the 21st, a group of 10 students will be gathered at the Ancient Faith Ministries headquarters in Chesterton, Indiana, to learn the essentials of podcasting and video games production. The weekend will include ins and outs of live radio production, video production and concept marketing, what you make and the future of Orthodox media. There will also be open work sessions for recording radio material, refining a personal project, and preparing a live radio broadcast. For more information, visit store.ancientfaith.com events we're.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Back now with the Lord of Spirits, the Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

Welcome back, everybody. That Lampstand Institute thing actually is supposed to be pretty cool. I'm.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Why can't I learn digital media skills?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're too old, man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's ageism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep. Old dog, new tricks. Not a thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Anybody who's heard any of my podcasts knows that I need to learn podcasting skills.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Look, you come up here, I'll show you a couple things, okay?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. You're old, too.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I know. But see, unlike you, I didn't get this in as my midlife crisis.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I need the zoomers to show me how to use the computers. That's what I need. I feel.

They don't want to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, it can happen for you, man. Yes. Well, welcome back. We're talking about how it is that people who met Jesus, how did they identify him as the Messiah, even though they weren't sitting there with a whole list of things from the Old Testament saying, aha, aha, he did this, he fulfilled that. How did they recognize him in their direct encounter with him as the Messiah? And in the first half we talked about Christ as embodying Israel, embodying Israel's story, the second as Christ embodying the Torah. And what's this one about, Father Stephen?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is about the way in which Jesus as the Messiah embodies Israel's God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so again, right. To clarify.

What we're going to be talking about here is we've done a lot about Christology, obviously in various episodes of this show. We had the whole series on Christ in the Old Testament.

We have talked about recently.

Christ is the divine Logos and wisdom and proverbs.

And all of those are approaching Christology basically sort of top down. So we're talking about the divine person who then.

Is made flesh. Right.

And that fact. So we're going to be talking, in a sense, talking about Christology now. Right. The way that Jesus is the Messiah embodies the God of Israel, but we're going to be coming at it from the opposite side. Right. So when the disciples first encountered Jesus, when the people who Jesus preached to first encountered him, the people of Jerusalem first saw him and heard him and encountered him. They encountered him as human. That was their immediate experience.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, he was frankly not walking around transfigured with the uncreated light most of the time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. That happened once briefly in front of three disciples. Right.

The rest of the time.

His people interacted with him. They were interacting with him as a human. Nevertheless. Nevertheless.

Some of them came to the conclusion that this person, Jesus, who we've met, who we've eaten meals with, who we've sat with, who we've slept next to while we were traveling overnight.

Embodies the God of Israel in a new, unique way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

This theologically has to do with Christ's humanity as the veil. Right. When we say that some people are thinking, oh, veil, like it's hidden, like Christ, humanity hides who he really is. That's not what we're saying. Right. Because Christ's Humanity is also who he really is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It is the veil in the sense of the veil that separated the holy of holies from the holy place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And that wasn't there to keep people from looking inside.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That was there to keep people from dying.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So that they wouldn't experience that whole death by holiness thing.

By entering into the presence of God in an unworthy manner.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And so.

There is a day when God will reveal himself.

And visit his people, and that's called the Day of the Lord. That's Judgment day. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, that is coming. I mean, it's interesting to think about. Right. Because sometimes people will say, well.

Why doesn't God just reveal Himself to me? Why doesn't he just reveal Himself to the world? Like, what's with all the hiding? You know, so you don't die. Yeah, it's so you don't die. I mean, I mean, I get the question. I get it, I get it. You know, seeing is believing and all that, but it really is because.

We would. We would suffer the consequences. You become responsible for whatever you receive. So God's hiddenness is actually a mercy and it's his patience so that we have time to repent. Right, right. So that's what the veil is about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so Christ's humanity is serving as this veil.

Right.

In that kind of protective way. Right. But it doesn't stop people, does it stop faithful people, People who are paying attention. Right. People who are listening to Christ from realizing that he is embodying the God of Israel. And so.

What do we mean by that other than just an ontological. Like you're like, okay, yeah, Jesus is God. Well, that's not just what we're saying. Right. Because we're being more particular than that. Right. He embodies the God of Israel, the God who we see in the Hebrew scriptures in the Old Testament. Right. A particular God. There's not a lot of value in generic God.

There's zero value in Plato's God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

By definition. So if there was just contemplates himself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If there was, for example, some guy who called himself a Christian apologist on the west coast who was heretical on every single topic of doctrine and spent most of his time just trying to argue with atheists that some kind of God exists, that would be of no value.

Hypothetically.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Shade throne three times. Well, that's two times those to the west for you. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

We'Re talking about the true and living God, a very particular God, the real God.

Who is embodied by Jesus as the Messiah.

And so what are some of the elements.

Right, that characterize.

The God we see in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament.

That we also see in Jesus. Right. Because Hebrews will say Jesus is the express image of his character. Right. This is it. So what is that character?

One of the first elements that's present all through the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is the humility of God, which is a strange phrase probably to most people.

Especially our Calvinist friends, who believe what God is all about is glorifying himself.

But in actuality, we see over and over again in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, the humility of God.

We see that over against other gods. Right. When you compare him with. The gods of the nations are always proclaiming their own, are always glorifying themselves, are always proclaiming, you know, how great and how powerful and wonderful they are, sometimes to comedic effect now that no one is worshiping them anymore. When we find the old tablets.

There'S sort of an Ozymandias thing going on with some of them.

But what do we see with the God of Israel, with the true God? He will, for example, identify himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We hear that all the time. We're used to hearing that God is the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. And we don't think every time God says that to identify himself, he's saying, I am the God of three generations of nomadic Bedouins.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not that big of a brag.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Not. Not super impressive in the ancient world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

Compared to the gods of Egypt, the gods of the Babylonian empire. The gods. Right. Three generations of nomadic Bedouins.

Right. This is. This is what we're getting at when we talk about the humility of God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The way that God.

Comes down to meet humanity and thereby elevates humanity.

Right. Particular human persons. God identifies himself as the protector of orphans and widows and the poor.

All these people who have no rights and no one to stand up for them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

God sends Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh and he identifies himself as the God of the Hebrews. And Pharaoh picks up on this pretty quickly and is like, oh, the God of a bunch of slaves.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The God of losers is basically the way that he takes it, you know? Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, he's like, well, whoever your God is, since I've enslaved you.

Mine must be better. And in Pharaoh's case, you know, he thought he was one himself, so. Right, right.

Like, this is. This is not normal in the ancient world.

For a God. Let Alone, the most high God, the God who created everything to choose to identify himself and who he would identify himself with.

And we also have to be honest, even when he's the God of Israel. Right. Or the God of Judah.

We have been brought up, right. Culturally, even if we weren't brought up in a Christian environment per se, or a Jewish environment per se.

We're brought up in a culture that's deeply informed by the Bible. And so we have this greatly outsized sense of how important Israel as a kingdom was.

Right. Because it's so central to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew scriptures. Right. But if we're just going by objective, quote unquote, geopolitics, material level archaeology.

Right. Then we're talking about a kingdom that existed as a united kingdom.

For like 100 years.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not in world history. Right. It's not one of the great empires of old, you know, regional.

A little bit more than tribes, you know, but.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, after that hundred years, it broke into.

One half of it, lasted 475 years and then was gone, never to return. That was the one named Israel, by the way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there was a nation in the world called Israel before 1948 for about 275 years.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In all of human history.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And Judah didn't conquer that much territory.

You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Judah gets 135 more years.

That. Right. So they get to about 400.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But you know, this is not some big empire, whatever. As far as world history is concerned, Israel is not a big deal in the ancient world.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes, I dare say. And as much as this may annoy our Jewish friends, if it weren't for Christianity, it would be a footnote.

If it weren't for Christianity.

Right. Incorporating the Hebrew scriptures into Christianity's Bible and then Christianity spreading through the whole world. Right. You would know about as much about ancient Israel, Judah as you know about the Hittites or the Luvians.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Tough but fair.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, that's right. So geopolitically on the stage of the world insignificant nation, God nonetheless identifies himself as the God of Israel. Yeah, the God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just to give you some sense of what this might be like, everybody, and I'm not, I'm not throwing shade on what in this podcast has been referred to in the past as the poor man's Ohio. But it'd be like saying it's. It's the God of Indiana.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, like, I mean, I love Indiana, you know, whatever. But, but no one's like saying, oh, Indiana, you know, that, that That's a, that's a very threatening place. You know, they're going to take over Illinois. You know, like it's not, it's, it's, it's not, it's not. We love you, Indiana.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Get ready for shots fired. It's like the God of Lithuania. What? Anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, the God of Netherlands. Very tall but very dim.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, very tall and very blonde, but other than that, blond and blunt, probably handsome. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, so. But this is the God who we meet in the Hebrew scriptures.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We meet the Hebrew scriptures a God who has, who created everything, created every human, created every nation, but chooses to identify himself.

With the weak, the powerless. Right. With, with Bedouins, with. Right. With short lived kingdoms.

Out of his love and out of his humility. And of course, we see this reflected in the life of Jesus right from the beginning. Right. You have the circumstances of his birth, both in the sense of being born in a cave that was used as a stable and being set in an animal food trough for a crib. Right. And living in dirt poverty in Nazareth. Right. His father was basically a day, like St. Joseph was a day laborer who did like fix it jobs for other peasants who were poor to pay him. But also.

There are clear indications in the Gospels, this isn't just something that comes later in Talmudic Judaism or something, that there were people at the time who made accusations about the circumstances of his birth. These people who didn't believe Jesus was the Messiah, did not believe in the virgin birth folks.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They thought there was something fishy. And you get things like in St. John's Gospel, a bunch of Jewish people who are arguing with him, just saying to Jesus, we know who our Father is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's not coincidental.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

God forgive them, right. For that blasphemy. But.

Right. Jesus was not born the son of Herod or the son of the Emperor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He was not.

Right.

And, and the poverty isn't just something in terms of his birth and early life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He never owned a place to live.

He never owned more than the clothes on his back. He traveled from place to place homeless. He would either someone would offer him hospitality or he and the disciples would sleep outside.

When they journeyed around. That's why we see them over in the Gospels, sleeping on boats.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, on fishing boats, just wherever they were. Right. Not settled in one place. And then of course, ultimately the ultimate display of Christ's humility is submitting himself to suffering and death and a particularly not just painful but shameful and humiliating death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the humility that's seen in the life of Jesus is the perfect reflection of the humility of God, of the God of Israel that we see in the Hebrew Scriptures.

This embodying of the God of Israel also ties into what we were talking about in the second half.

Not just that Jesus embodies the Torah, but Jesus also teaches it. He is the giver of it.

Right? And the way that he gives it, the way that he teaches it, the centrality of love in his teaching and his message, which by the way, is also the central theme of the book of Deuteronomy.

The fifth book of the Torah, of the Pentateuch, right? Who follows this pattern of God, who gave it in the first place, right? And it's very important, right, that another way in which, related to the Torah, Jesus embodies the God of Israel is that just like at Mount Sinai when the Torah was given through Moses, Moses comes down, reads the Book of the Covenant to the people, and the people say, oh, yeah, all that you've said, we're going to do that, yes. And then they do none of that, right?

In the same way, Christ comes and lives out and expresses and teaches the Torah and communicates this way of life to people and they reject it.

This is the whole arc of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Right? From the narrative portions that show it to the prophets who explain it. This way is God coming, condescending in his humility to love Israel and Israel rejecting him.

And God being faithful to Israel and Israel being faithless.

Right? That's the whole story. That's the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is not me insulting Jewish people, right? This is their Bible. This is right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, they know full well, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the ark of the Hebrew Scriptures. And we see that ark in the life of Jesus.

We see that ark of the life of Jesus. He came to his own and his own received him not.

Right? He comes to his people and they reject him.

Right? And this way in which the blessings of God get repaid with faithfulness and betrayal in the Old Testament and the teaching and the miracles done by Christ get repaid with rejection and attack, right? And suffering in the life of Jesus as the Messiah, right? This becomes the subject of meditation. A lot of our Holy Week texts, a lot of our Holy Week hymnography is meditating on how this relationship between Jesus and his people.

Mirrors parallels, embodies the relationship between God and his people.

And so we've got examples.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, indeed.

So.

Yes, in a Holy Week, there are, well, a lot of hymns, but we're going to read one of them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

From more than three.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, more than three. How about that? Yes. Yeah. Just go to church a lot during Holy Week. People just go to church. Just take the week off and go to everything. It's the only way to live anyway. In.

The service of Royal Hours, which is celebrated on Holy Friday morning.

One of the hymns from Royal Hours goes like this.

When thou wast led to the cross, O Lord, thou didst say. For what act do ye wish, O Jews, to crucify me? Is it because I have strengthened your cripples? Is it because I raised your dead as from the sleep, healed the woman of her issue of blood, and showed mercy upon the Canaanitish woman? For what act, O ye Jews? Desire ye my death.

But ye shall behold him whom ye pierced, O law transgressors, and know that he is Christ.

So that's that. That one hymn.

And.

You know, this is not something that is like. It's not new. There's some people that look at some of these and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But actually, this is just a recapitulation of themes from the Scriptures and again, indeed from the Old Testament.

So. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to give an example from the Old Testament that is the same kind of thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So although there are plenty of these as well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, there are lots. Right, right. There are lots. This is not the exact same words, but I think you're going to hear the same kind of theme here and with this sort of a similar kind of rhetoric. So this is From Jeremiah, chapter 3, verses 19 through 21.

This is God speaking. I thought how I would set you among my sons and give you a pleasant land. This is God speaking to Israel, by the way, a heritage most beauteous of all nations. And I thought you would call me my father and would not turn from following me. Surely as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me. O house of Israel, says Yahweh. A voice on the bear heights is heard the weeping and pleading of Israel's sons, because they have perverted their way, they have forgotten the Lord their God.

So it's. Again, it's this sort of. As of course, is typical, especially with Jeremiah, this kind of lamenting, you know, God saying, I did this for you, I did this for you, I did this for you, and yet you turned away, and yet you sinned against me. So it's the exact same kind of rhetoric in both that Holy Week hymn and then this particular example from Jeremiah. But again, many such cases, both from Holy Week and from the Old Testament.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And this should help us understand what's going on in these Holy Week texts.

Because unfortunately we have some folks who don't understand what is going on in these Holy Week texts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There are people.

Who look at the Holy Week texts and see these things, these critical things addressed to Israel and the Jews. Or the Jews. Yeah. Or really like Judeans is kind of a better translation, although.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But the way it reads in English is usually the Jews.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The Jews. Right.

And they say, well, that's anti Semitism, that's blame shifting, that's whatever. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And what I'll say to that is. And we'll get much deeper into why that's so super wrong. But like, there's a very elementary way to know why that's wrong without getting into the. The deeper reason, which is way more interesting, by the way. But the elementary reason is that it should be very clear the historical context of the events. The Gospels is first century Palestine. There's nothing in those hymns and there's nothing in the Old Testament texts, but particularly there's nothing in those hymns when it's talking about Jesus's passion and death and so forth that is assigning this to some racial group. Right. It's addressed to the people who were there and did those things at the time. And as we have pointed out in the atonement episode, as I recall.

You know, and when this has been talked about, you know, blood being on people, you look at the Torah, when blood goes upon people, it's to cleanse them. So that language that's in the Scriptures that sometimes people say, well, that's anti Semitic, you know, his blood be upon us and on our children is actually a prophecy about Christ's atonement, about Christ's cleansing of the world. So it's actually a blessing. Now, is it the case that some people in history have looked at these kinds of texts, whether hymns or stuff in the Scriptures and so forth, and have turned it into actual racist, anti Semitism, hate all Jews everywhere, everywhen. Yes, they have. That is wrong. That is a misreading of the scriptures. That is a misreading of these hymns. So on its face it's a misreading. But let's look underneath the face a little bit and see the deeper reason why this is a very wrong way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

To read this stuff and to clarify that too. Remember, ideas don't cause things. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed, no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People who hate, who have hated the Jewish people for a variety of Reasons, social, cultural, economic, all kinds of reasons have weaponized these texts against them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so the core of the issue here is. The core of the issue here is, and this is in line with a lot of critiques we've made of liberal theological movements.

Is that you have people of a certain liberal sensibility.

And.

They realize that.

Part of understanding what the scriptures say.

The Christian scriptures say, and early Christian hypnography and the church fathers and, and, and.

Part of what that means when we say that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

Because, by the way, nobody else had a messiah.

Right? The Norwegians, the Romans.

The Chinese people were not waiting for a messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So when we say Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

That kind of entails that. That means a Jewish person who doesn't accept Jesus as the Messiah is rejecting their Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if we accept that Jesus is.

Jesus, embodies the God of Israel.

Then a Jewish person who rejects that is to some extent rejecting who their God is.

And if we accept that the Hebrew scriptures are teaching about Jesus as the Messiah, then we're saying to Jewish people that they don't understand their Bible, they don't understand their scriptures correctly.

And people of a certain liberal sensibility don't want to say those things. The second part, right. Of all of those statements, right. It offends their sensibilities, right. To say that about Jewish people.

And because.

The worst thing that can happen to them.

Is for them to appear bad in public.

Or to face some kind of accusation like that they were anti Semitic or something.

They decide to go the whole route and just become anti Semitic. What do I mean by that?

In order to not say that Jewish people have rejected their Messiah by not accepting Jesus.

They try to get rid of the idea that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

And this warps and skews their theology until Jesus just becomes the Savior of the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which he is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But his Jewishness gets ripped away.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And we don't want to say that Jewish people have misunderstood their God who they worship.

So he's no longer the God of Israel. All the Jewishness gets stripped away. Now he's just Plato's God, or God in general, the God of the whole universe, the God who created everything. Just God God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which. That is the basis for why people reject the kind of language that we've just been reading. You know, if you regard God as sort of the generic God, the Platonic God that's out there somewhere contemplating himself, then the idea that you would inject the specificity of the relationship of God with his people, Israel.

That'S necessitated then. Right. You have to reject that specificity because does that seem weird that he's the God of only these people? But that is what the scripture says, is that he's the God of Israel. And for him to then be. I mean, there is a sense in which, of course, he is the God of every single person and place and thing in the universe. That is true. But he has also revealed himself as the God of Israel. And that means that his relationship to Israel is different than his relationship to everything else. Which means then if you want that relationship, you have to become part of Israel. Right. Which is what the church is. And I'm sure in a future episode we'll go into some great detail about that relationship.

But yeah, you can't escape the Israel stuff. You can't escape the Jewish stuff and be an actual Christian.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And they don't want to say Jewish people have misunderstood the Hebrew scriptures, their Bible. And so we're just going to ignore the Old Testament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which again, that's the core of. That's the core of. Is of Jew, you know, to be Jewish. Is that those scriptures.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So as Christians, we just won't read that or talk about it at all. And we'll warp our reading of the New Testament so that it doesn't require the Old Testament.

Right. And we'll take it in this other direction where it's disconnected.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sorry. Crypto. Marcionites. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So. And so this is the most anti Semitic thing possible.

Because what you end up with is a white, liberal, enlightened religious class that has this universal religion with a universal God and a universal savior.

Right. And then, oh, well, yeah, we let the Jews go and do their thing in the corner over there.

And we let them be. And we respect their traditions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which is infantilizing to them.

Right. That's antisemitism, folks.

The people who want to edit your Holy Week book and take out all the references to the Jews, the people who want to make Christianity not Jewish anymore. They're the anti Semites.

Okay? They're the ones with the colonial attitude.

That's where they've ended up.

So don't get confused about that. Right. In their concern for their public reputation. Right. And not wanting to be accused of anything or look anti Semitic, they go mask off with their actual anti Semitism.

So that rant done, kind of. I'm going to revisit that in my final comments, so get ready.

But.

What we've been talking about in this Third half is how Jesus embodies the God of Israel, who's a very particular God, right? The living God, the actual God.

But we've done that. Again, we're not saying this is all that's to be said about that. We're not saying any of those things. But this is a way of approaching that from the bottom up. In terms of the people who encountered Jesus and first encountered him as as far as they could initially tell a human, how they came to understand that he embodied Israel's God, how that was part of what led them to identify him as the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen.

Well, just to give my own final thoughts, I'm not going to be throwing out any anti Semitism mic drops. I will leave that to you, my friend.

Although I enjoyed it a lot.

You know, this episode for me has been very illuminating because.

One of the core questions in the Gospels that Jesus asks people is, who do you say that I am?

And it's not like a quiz when he says that to them, like, let me see how much Christology you guys got down. So who do you say that I am? And of course the response is, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. You are the Messiah. They recognized that he was the Messiah. And we just spent the last couple hours going over exactly what that means. When St. Peter said that, when anyone else said that.

I should mention, by the way, that it was St. Andrew who first introduced St. Peter to Jesus and said the Messiah.

Just got to get that in there.

So how does that apply for us? Right. It's useful and valuable for us to ask, what did people in the first century, in first century Palestine, how did they understand this man that they met? Why did they say that he was the Messiah? Right? How does that apply for us? Because it might come across as some sort of. Well, this is a very interesting intellectual exercise, you know, casting our minds back 2000 years and seeing what they might have seen and try to imagine for ourselves. But, you know, now we live in this point where all or most of the prophecies have been fulfilled and so on and so forth. So how does that apply? Right.

So here's the thing.

For someone to be a Christian.

Means that they have met Christ.

It means that they had the experience that St. John talks about at the end of his Gospel where he says, these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ and that believing you may have life in his name. And of course, as we've said, I don't know how many thousand times in this podcast, believing There is not just about agreeing. It's about becoming faithful.

So these are written that you may be faithful to Jesus the Christ, and that being faithful, you may have life in his name. That is another way to read that exact same verse.

So what does it mean for us to have that meeting with Christ, to become faithful to that revelation of him as the Messiah?

Well, it means a lot of different things for different people. And by that I don't mean, well, you know, whatever it means to you. I don't mean that. I'm not throwing out some kind of theological relativism, but I am saying that people encounter the Lord Jesus Christ in different ways. He reveals Himself to people in different ways.

Some people, they enter into.

The beauty and the worship of the church.

And.

They meet God.

There's hardly any other way to describe it. They meet him, they meet the Lord Jesus.

Some people, they study the Scriptures very closely and over time.

The realization comes upon them and Christ reveals them himself to them through their experience of the Scriptures. Some people receive unconditional love from someone, and let's face it, that is a rarer commodity in this world than it should be, even from family.

And in that unconditional love, Christ reveals Himself to them.

And for many people, it's some combination of those things or something else, but it's coming upon that truth. And by that I don't just mean a mental understanding, but the truth. Knowing. Knowing.

That he is the Christ, that He is the Messiah, that He is the one that we have hoped for.

That's how the apostles put it.

That's how the apostles put it.

And that's the basis for our being Christian, is that we encountered Christ and we found Him. And this is where we're going to follow him, is here in the church, because this is his body. This is where he is. This is where he's revealing Himself. This is where when we say Christ is in our midst, it really is true. Christ is in our midst.

And so when we talk about who Jesus is, right? It's not about Christology as some kind of precise theological academic discipline, although it's important to have that precise theological language. But as Father Stephen said earlier, the point of that dogmatic language is to create boundaries past which we don't wander off.

The dogmatic language does not encapsulate who the Lord Jesus is.

Right? It just puts those boundaries around the edge. There is an encounter with the risen Christ, an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel.

That each of us has and can have and sometimes begins at one point and unfolds over a lifetime.

There's a whole narrative dynamic to it for each one of us. And.

I'm not talking about some kind of like woo woo spiritual experience, although some people have experiences that probably could be described in that way. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about the revelation of Christ to you.

And you know, Father, I've heard you say in the past that someone comes to your parish. I mean, I agree with this. If someone comes to your parish and they want to become orthodox for any reason other than here I meet Christ here, I see Christ here I wish to follow Christ.

Then it's not time for them yet.

Because this is what Christianity is.

It's the way of life.

In which we encounter the Lord Jesus and we follow him and we become more like him and we are incorporated into Him. That's what Christianity is.

All the other things that get that sort of fan out from that can be very important and helpful and so on and so forth, but there is a center. And this is what it is. This is why the gospel is preached. This is why the gospel is that Jesus is the Messiah. That is why that is a central part of that proclamation. This is who he is. This is what he did, this is what he expects from us.

And so my hope for this episode is that it will have contributed to those of you who are listening to this, it will have contributed.

To your vision.

Of Jesus as the Messiah, as the one sent by God, the anointed one sent by God to be.

The Savior of Israel and the Savior in as much as we are incorporated into Israel, of the world and the one who has reclaimed his throne in the heavens and whose kingdom shall have no end.

So that's what I have to say about that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So one of the things we've lost.

In the contemporary world is a sense of heritage.

And that's for a whole pile of reasons. Right? You know, late capitalism, turning us all into consumers, units of consumption. Before that it was units of labor.

Intense individualism. We see our own life as a story and an end in, in and of itself.

We don't see ourselves.

Having any real direct connection to our ancestors beyond, you know, the curiosity of going and figuring out our family tree and learning about them maybe, but.

We certainly don't see them as sort of living on in us or we don't interpret our personal experience and our personal identity in terms of their experience anymore.

What do I mean by that?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you read, as of course I do, being a priest, every time I celebrate the liturgy. If you read the prayers in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, whether we're talking about St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom.

What you find is you get a sense of the identity of the people of the community that is praying these prayers.

And the heritage, it's expressed.

As an experience of the people there praying them.

Sort of parallel to in the way. In Passover. The way Passover was celebrated was we celebrated was.

That it was not the family saying, this is the day on which our ancestors were brought out of Egypt. Right? It's this is the night when we are brought out of Egypt. We were slaves in Egypt. Us sitting around this table.

What you find in the Divine Liturgy.

Because our Divine Liturgy prayers come from communities that were not primarily.

Honestly not even significantly Jewish by that point is you find a reflection of the actual experience of us Gentiles, which is that God called us away and set us free from the worship of idols.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

God brought us from.

Idolatry, sexual immorality, violence, all of those things.

To worship the true and living God, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And it's expressed in the prayers as that happening to us who are gathered there, not my distant ancestors, us.

And that's a sense of identity and heritage that I don't think is real for a lot of us as Christians anymore.

A lot of people balk at it. One of the harshest responses I get from people is when I point out, and someone Greek hears it, that, sorry, Greek folks, I love you, but your ancestors were demon worshipping pederasts. That's what they were. Forget about the democracy stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was gonna say it's true for almost all of us, right?

Pretty much. Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm getting there.

Forget the democracy stuff. Forget the other stuff, Right. That was the reality.

And then a Jewish guy named Saul of Tarsus showed up.

Showed up in Athens, he showed up in Corinth, he showed up in Thessaloniki, and he spoke to your ancestors and he told your ancestors about the true and living God. And he told your ancestors about the Jewish Messiah.

And he explained the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek for their sake to your ancestors so that they could leave that and be set free from that to worship the true and living God. As Jesus says in St. John's Gospel, salvation is from the Jews.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And as I just said to Father Andrew, I'm getting to it, right? While that was happening and the Greeks were starting to become Christians, my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and dancing around fires and Killing and eating their neighboring tribesmen. Okay, so not saying mines were better, right? But eventually, eventually the gospel got up there too, right? To the lowlands.

Eventually it got there. I'm also part Greek, by the way. It's a small part.

That's what happened. And that's part of who I am and who you are.

As a gentile Christian. That's part of our story.

Our story is a story of getting grafted in, as St. Paul says, to the tree that has Abraham as its root, so that Abraham is the father of many nations.

So that Jewish heritage becomes part spiritually of my heritage.

But there's this danger.

This danger that comes, as we were saying in my previous rant, right, of people who want to de. Particularize the gospel.

Who want to remove the Jewishness of Christianity. Christianity is Judaism.

It is a form of Judaism, not it was. It is.

Right. Our argument with Rabbinic Judaism is who's right about Judaism? It's not about. It's not two different religions, right? It's who has Judaism, right? Who has the Torah, right? Who has the Messiah, right?

That's, that's the disagreement.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And to, to.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Try to de Judaize.

The scriptures, to de Judaize Christianity.

Will always distort what Christianity is.

Will always warp what Christianity is.

The concern that people currently have about not wanting to look anti Semitic.

Or being queasy, right, about disagreeing with Jewish people about their own scriptures.

Needs to be redirected.

Needs to be redirected the way St. Paul directed it.

Rather than being concerned about how we look.

We should be concerned about the salvation of Jewish people.

We should long for a day and pray that a day comes when the patriarchate of Jerusalem gets overtaken by waves.

Of Jewish people embracing Jesus as the Messiah and becoming Christians.

That should be a day that we hope and pray will come.

But what that requires is actual love for Jewish people. Not wanting to justify myself and not appear anti Semitic or hateful or judgmental.

Not having a condescending attitude toward Jewish people will let them have their religion.

That requires me to actually love them.

To want them to fully embrace the truth of their Messiah.

Their God, their heritage, their covenants.

That's the attitude we see reflected in Christ in St. Paul, in the scriptures, in the church.

In our liturgics.

And that's the attitude we need to shift back to having. And the way back to that, I think, comes from re embracing the truth of our heritage.

That I was once an idolater, I was once lost in immorality, I was once lost in violence and bloodshed.

And then the word came to me about the Jewish Messiah and that person I was died and a new person came into existence.

And that new person has Abraham as a father.

So those are my final thoughts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen. Amen.

That is our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you very much for listening. If we didn't actually get to talk to you live tonight, which we didn't actually get any calls tonight about any of this, but we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at Lord of spirits and ancient faith.com you can message us at our Facebook page, or you can leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or need help finding a parish, head over to orthodoxintro.org and join us.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For our live broadcast of the 2nd 4th Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. You've got your arms held out like you've been carrying a load and you swear to me you don't want to be my slave if you're on dare at me like I need to be.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Saved if you are on Facebook, follow our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but most importantly, share the show with one of your friends who is going to benefit from it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. I swear to you I would never feed you pain but you're staring at me like I need.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you, good night. God bless you.

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation, chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.