Pastor Tony Costa joins host Phil Sessa to engage in a profound discourse regarding Eastern Orthodoxy, a tradition that asserts its identity as the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church established by Jesus Christ. Throughout our conversation, we delve into the historical roots and theological distinctions that set Eastern Orthodoxy apart from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, particularly examining its rejection of papal authority and its adherence to ancient liturgical practices. We explore the implications of these beliefs on concepts such as salvation, original sin, and the veneration of icons. As we unpack these critical topics, we aim to encourage listeners to think critically about their faith and the tenets of various Christian traditions. Join us as we navigate this complex theological landscape and strive to understand the essence of Eastern Orthodoxy in the context of biblical Christianity.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we delve into the complexities of Eastern Orthodoxy, exploring its historical roots and theological distinctives in relation to other Christian traditions.
• Pastor Tony Costa elucidates the significance of the Great Schism of 1054, which marked the division between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, shaping the theological landscape of Christianity.
• We examine the unique views of Eastern Orthodoxy regarding salvation, emphasizing their rejection of original sin and the implications this has on their understanding of the atonement.
• The discussion highlights the modern appeal of Eastern Orthodoxy to disillusioned evangelicals, particularly among young men seeking a more traditional and structured expression of faith.
• Pastor Costa contrasts the beliefs of Eastern Orthodoxy with those of Protestantism, particularly in areas such as the authority of scripture and the nature of grace, emphasizing the differences in understanding salvation and church authority.
• Throughout the podcast, we advocate for a return to biblical teaching and the importance of discernment in understanding the nuances of church history and doctrine.

Links referenced in this episode:

• stopandthinkpodcast.com
• soulfishingministries.org
• christoverall.com
• zondervan.com

Foreign.

They explicitly claim to be the one holy catholic and apostolic church founded by Jesus Christ.

What is this religion?

I know many of you are thinking Roman Catholicism.

Yet this religion rejects papal crowns of Rome and guards a mystical, unyielding devotion to ancient liturgy filled with the scent of frankincense, riddled with icons and chanting, with many flocking to this religion.

What religion is this?

Join us as we take this time to stop and think about it.

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Anybody home?

I don't think, McFly.

Think.

I'm thinking.

I'm thinking.

What were you thinking?

I'm trying to think, but nothing happens.

Dan't say anything now.

Just think about it.

You're listening to Stock and Think About It, a podcast for the Christian thinker.

In a day when sound biblical preaching has been replaced by man centered entertainment and the church has become increasingly anti intellectual, this podcast will encourage believers to think biblically and theologically.

So please join me as we get ready to stop and think about it.

Well, greetings friends and foes, saints and sinners.

Welcome to this episode of the Stop and Think about it podcast.

And we're dealing with understanding Eastern Orthodoxy.

I'm your host, Phil Sessa, AKA the Bronx Expositor.

And I have back with me for the second time, apologist and pastor from Toronto, Canada, Tony Costa.

Welcome.

It's a pleasure to be with you, brother.

I do fondly remember the first time being on with you and I'm excited to be with you on this podcast as well.

Amen.

So you were, you were due for a return.

Every.

Every seven years.

That's it.

Every seven years.

I think we're going to bring that time closer.

So introduce yourself and your ministry to our listeners.

Tell us about your ministry, your church.

Sure.

Well, my name is Tony Costa.

I am Toronto, Canada, born in Canada, true Canadian from Portuguese parentage.

And I was raised Roman Catholic, very religious, Roman Catholic household.

And I came to know the Lord through the witness of two of my cousins who came to Christ.

And at the young age of 15, I turned to Christ and submitted to him, accepted him as Lord and Savior.

And thereon I moved into apologetics.

The Lord led me into that field and I pursued higher education.

I did a bachelor's and master's at the University of Toronto in Biblical studies, philosophy, languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

And then I did my PhD in Holland in the Netherlands on New Testament and theology.

And I'm also an ordained minister of the Gospel.

I have pastored several churches in Toronto and the surrounding areas, but I am now at Parkland Baptist Church in Toronto and been pastoring there for about two years now.

And I also teach with the University of Toronto in various areas like archaeology of the Bible and the ancient Aries Gospel studies.

I'm also teaching a course on the Book of Revelation at the university.

And so my ministry is both an academic one, but also a pastoral one.

I love the people of God and I spend most of my time not just pastoring, but also I just got back from the John Bunyan Conference in Franklin, Tennessee.

We had a wonderful turnout there, and I'm always on the move, involved in outreach to Islamic apologetics and outreach to Eastern Orthodox Roman Catholics and other groups.

So it's an exciting ministry and the Lord has really blessed me.

I've been involved in this for about 40 years now.

So God's good.

Amen.

And did you see my friend Gary George there?

Of course.

Brotherness.

Of course.

Brotherness.

I love it.

He's always got that smile, you know, he's always that, you know, that's a gem.

Yeah, he's.

He's a gem.

He's a former Eastern Orthodox member himself.

He was with the Albanian Orthodox Church.

And so he came to Christ as well.

Now the Lord appointed him as a shepherd many, many years in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Right, right, right.

Well, amen for that.

Just a quick note for the tens and tens of people who tune into our podcast, check out the videos from our third annual Contending conference.

It's an apologetics conference at the Grace Baptist church, Woodhaven on YouTube channel.

Amen.

Well, we're going to jump into this and I'm highly looking forward to this.

And like you, I came to Christ at a young age, at 13, out of Roman Catholicism.

And when the priest asked, what are you going to do now that you're going to become an adult in Roman Catholicism?

I told him I was leaving it.

And that became an opportunity to share the gospel with him.

So my mom told me still to go through my confirmation.

She didn't really understand, have the party and all of that, just finish it off.

So anyway, I got some money and I got some gifts and I was very young, but.

But never looked back.

And then years, about two years later, I actually got to preach to their youth, to that Roman Catholic youth group that I came out of.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

But my heart has been really moved and bleeding toward this, this whole issue with Orthodoxy.

Loved ones from our church that moved on to Tennessee, actually, they have a.

Someone in their family who has been going to swallowed up in in Orthodoxy.

And, and I have people who are kind of dipping their toes in the water with this.

And I realize that a lot of people have flocked to this and we're going to get into that in a minute.

But.

All right, so what is Orthodoxy and is this even a proper title for them?

Yeah, well, their technical title is Eastern Orthodoxy.

Now the word Orthodoxy, as you know the word Orthodoxy means right doctrine.

And so the Church of Jesus Christ is Orthodox in the sense that we preach the whole counsel of God.

And so it's, let's say Orthodoxy with a little.

Okay, you and I are both Orthodox because we believe in the fundamentals of the Christian faith and doctrines of grace and so forth.

Same with the word Catholic.

It's.

That word has been.

We have easily given it over to the Roman Catholic Church because the word Catholic simply means universal or global.

And so in, in, in little C. Catholic, the Church of Jesus Christ is Catholic in the sense that she is made up of all peoples, all nations.

She's global, she's around the world.

And so I always, I always kind of stir the, the pot when I tell people that I'm an Orthodox Catholic Christian.

What do you mean?

Are you converted?

I said no, no, no, I am Orthodox and I'm part of the Catholic, the universal church of Jesus Christ.

Now when we talk Eastern Orthodox with a capital E, capital O.

And of course there's the Oriental Orthodox Churches like the Coptic Church from Egypt and Ethiopia.

So on.

Eastern Orthodox Church is a church that grew out of the east, out of the Eastern part of what we would have called the Byzantium kingdom, which was centered in Constantinople in modern day Turkey.

But back in the day it was, the Romans called it Asia Minor.

It's where the seven churches of revelation were.

They were directed at the seven churches of Asia Minor in modern day Turkey.

And so it is an institution that eventually it evolved, it developed much like Roman Catholicism.

We know that Paul had written to the Romans and someone else had planted the church in Rome.

It wasn't Paul.

Paul himself says that someone else built that church.

And the church of Rome at one time was a Orthodox, in other words, a very straight teaching, gospel preaching church under the apostles.

But as you know, over time the Roman Church apostatized.

It evolved into something that it was never meant to be from the apostles.

And so same thing happened with Eastern Orthodoxy.

So it all starts with the, the wedding of the, the church and state under Constantine.

So once, once politics and religion get together, there's, there's always power involved, corruption involved and so eventually, the Eastern Church drew their line in the sand and distinguished themselves from the Western Church and the Church of Rome, Roman Catholicism.

And so it had its own patriarchs, it had its own authority structure.

Now, this is important, Phil, very important.

1054 Is the great Schism, the separation in east and West.

Before that, all you had was the Church east and West.

So let's just call it, lack of a better word, let's call it the Catholic Church.

At the time, it was a church that was different in language.

Greek was the language of the East, Latin was the language of the West.

And so there were two different languages.

The liturgies were different, different langu.

But then in the Great Schism, Rome excommunicated the Eastern Orthodox Church because they refused to submit to the Pope, to the supremacy of the Pope.

And so it's really around there that they begin to differentiate themselves.

They begin to put borders around themselves and say, we are the one true Church, we are the ancient Church.

And of course, Rome says the same thing.

They're the ancient Church going back to Peter, the first Pope.

And then, of course, the Copts say, no.

The Coptic Church says, no, we're the original church.

The Assyrian Church of these says, no, we're the original church.

So it's like that Spider man meme, I don't know if you've seen it, where they got all these different spider men and they're all pointing at each other saying, no, I'm the real Spider Man.

No, I'm the real Spider Man.

Got it.

And so, so what you have really is the.

The development of an institutional church that looks very different than the Church looked in the first 300 years.

So the 300 years of the church look nothing like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism.

So what you're looking at is the development, the evolution of an institutional entity that begins to kick its heels and say we are the only true Church.

But then again says that every.

Everyone's saying that.

And we need to really look at the political religious development of these institutions.

And the trick here is to make you think that what we are today, this is exactly what the ancient Church looked like.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Now they have the.

The leadership.

From what I was reading, they have a very false humility.

The monks were.

They were.

It was somehow glorified themselves.

They abused.

They was.

They abused themselves mentally, physically.

They abused their bodies.

They Smashed their heads on the ground.

I mean like where in the world some even prayed to be possessed by devils, become paralyzed, I mean, lose their sight.

Where in the world does all of this come from?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So the, the person who wrote the manual for the, what you just discussed, the monastic order, it was actually a man by the name of St. John Climacus.

And, and he's also called St. John of the Latter and he was canonized by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

He was the abbot of the monastery in St. Catherine's in the Sinai Peninsula.

And you're absolutely right.

In his manual he talked about them banging their foreheads against the pavement and some of them pleading to be possessed by devils.

I put a video out on that, Phil, and the vitriol that I received from the Eastern Orthodox and some of them trying to defend it and taking scripture out of context to try to defend that.

And I pointed out that Jesus didn't come to have his people possessed.

He came to cast out demons as the apostles did.

And he came to set people free and to, to take advantage of the strong man and bind him.

And so we're doing the exact opposite of what he came to do.

And so what you end up having is you've also got this, this Gnostic element.

If you know anything about Gnosticism, I'm.

Preaching through first John.

Perfect.

You got pronostics right there.

So the Gnostics believed that the body was, was basically dirt, that the body was inferior, the body, what he did with the body didn't matter.

And so they, some of them even denied that, that the, that the material world existed.

So Jesus really wasn't a true human being.

He was a phantom of sorts.

And so the Gnostics would basically demean the body.

And so in these monasteries you've got this idea of self flagellation like the, the Roman Catholic monks where they themselves or they walk on their knees.

And so you've got this mortification of the body, but it's really an abuse of the body.

And, and, and the, the unbiblical part of this is that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit that are belong to Christ.

And one day Christ will raise our bodies into, into glorious bodies like his own.

Either either when he returns in glory or if we die, he will raise us up at the, at the last day.

And so what you have is this Gnostic and this, this Gnosticism creeping in and, and mortifying the body.

That is none, none of that is biblical.

Jesus never taught asceticism now that's say some of the Puritans believed in this idea of, of this mystical union with Christ, but they did not mean mortifying the body, you know, whipping yourself, exposing yourself to the, to the elements in the winter and, and at never begging the demons to take over you.

And so while they accuse Protestants of being, they usually accuse us of being Nestorians because we, they think we, we have an issue with, with Mary being the mother of, of God the Son incarnate.

And we can talk a little bit more about that.

But sure, they think that we, we are Nestorians, that Christ somehow is two persons.

We, no Protestant has ever believed that or confessed that.

And, and they also accuse us of Gnosticism because we don't believe that the Lord's Supper, that the bread and the cup are become the body, the literal body and blood of Christ substantiation.

But we reject that.

Not because, we reject that, not because we're Gnostics.

We reject that because we're not cannibals.

We don't believe that we're actually munched on human flesh like on Jesus's femur bone or something.

Right.

And so we can get into that as well.

But, but the whole, the whole point here is that at, at its most base level, root level, it is a works, righteousness, salvation.

And so it's all about suffering.

I've had one Eastern Orthodox guy tell me that these monks wanted to be possessed by demons.

And he said, I would rather be possessed by.

This is him speaking to me in my chat.

I would rather be possessed by demons so that in the next life Christ doesn't send me to hell.

And, and I, I, I was just taken aback, flabbergasted that, that someone would say that I would rather be possessed by demons.

Now do you understand what demonic possession is?

And if the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts, in our, in our bodies, the Holy Spirit does not share his temple with demons.

And so.

Right.

Just goes to show that they're so committed to this idol called the Eastern Orthodox Church that they will do anything to defend it, to, not to honor Christ, but to honor the church.

And that have a problem, brother, is that the Eastern Orthodox Church has literally become an idol to the Eastern Orthodox.

Yes, yes.

And so not only can a true believer not be possessed by a demon because they're, they're empowered by the spirit of God.

They wouldn't desire such a thing because they've been set free.

Oh, exactly.

We serve out of life, not the, not the Prince of Darkness.

And, and so the only people I know that want to be possessed are Satanists and witches.

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

So those that, that, that want to go back really never left, so to speak.

Right.

Now where they believe their authority comes from.

And do you think that this, this term, what we believe in the five SOLAs, do you think that they would hold to sola ecclesia?

Yes, that would be their, their default position.

They would hold to sol ecclesia.

They believe that the Church is infallible in the same way Scripture is infallible.

And they believe the Church cannot err, it cannot fall into error.

And therefore what the Scripture says and what the Bible says are virtually the same thing.

So tradition and Scripture are one stream.

They look at us as one stream issuing the Church.

They make the audacious claims that they not only possess the Bible, they gave us the Bible and they set the canon of the Bible for us, which is preposterous because they can't even agree on the Old Testament canon.

They don't even have a fixed canon for the Old Testament like we do.

I see Protestants following Jerome way back in the fourth century.

Jerome studied Hebrew.

And as he studied Hebrew, he realized that the, the Jews.

One thing that we can all agree on, Romans 3, 2, when Paul says, what value is there in being a Jew?

And then he says very, very much, for unto them were given the oracles of God.

And so if, if the Jews do not know what the Old Testament contains, nobody knows.

And, and so Jerome obviously said, look, the, the Old Testament is we should follow the Jewish or the Testament.

But the whole point here is that they will make the audacious claims that if it wasn't for us, you wouldn't even have a Bible.

You wouldn't even know what's in the Bible.

Sounds familiar.

Very familiar.

Exactly.

And the Canon of Rome, the seven books they add to the Old Testament.

I mean, the Orthodox have many more books and the Ethiopians have even many more.

They have the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees.

But all that to say, brother, all that to say that sole ecclesia is their modus operandi.

That is how they function.

Church alone.

The Church tells you what to believe, the Church tells you what books are in the Bible and therefore it's not sola scriptura.

And if you ask yourself why are they so hard on Protestants and Roman Catholics?

And it's because the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris was.

Came into contact with Calvinists who had come into Byzantium, into Turkey, and they shared the gospel of grace with the Patriarch of Constantinople.

And guess what?

Cyril Lucaris did.

He converted to reformed Christianity.

He was not only the Patriarch of Constantinople, he put out a confession called the Confession of Cyril Lucaris.

Very well documented.

He put out a confession that basically reads like Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion Scriptura.

He affirmed sola gratia grace alone, sola fide faith alone.

He affirmed sola scriptura and soli deo gloria to the glory of God alone.

And it wasn't too long before he was displaced from his chair and eventually murdered.

Killed by the Orthodox.

So here you have a patriarch in history who actually was reformed in his theology while the patriarch and teaching Reformed doctrine to the Church.

It's so very well documented.

Just look up Cyril Lucaris.

There's a lot of great documentation out there on this patriarch and there's a wonderful book written on him.

I think it's called the First Protestant Patriarchy.

Wow.

This.

This I didn't know.

And this is why it's important to know church history.

Absolutely.

Because it just, it just enriches, you know, our historical roots.

Absolutely.

And I mean, my heart is, is warm now.

This is, I mean, what an amazing thing.

And, and you look at how they respond.

They don't spot.

Respond in Christ like this and try to like, woo him back.

No, it's.

It's join or die.

Yeah.

So like I was on with David Wood, had me on his channel to talk about Eastern Orthodoxy and, and he said to me, and I agreed with him.

I said the, the script that the ortho bros are using is the same as the.

Is the Islamic Dawah gangs.

It's the same script.

And so they'll say, oh, you're gay and, or you're.

You're crazy.

When did you're.

I know.

So there's a.

It's the same rhetoric.

It's.

It's almost like it's.

They repeat the same mantra and, and so they, There's a lot of straw manning that goes on.

We don't believe that.

They, they think that, that where Johnny come lately, that the early church Fathers didn't teach any of this.

And yet you find Church fathers like John Chrysostom and you find Church Father Clement of Rome.

These guys are talking about election.

They're talking about faith alone.

They even say that we're justified by faith alone.

Where do you think the Reformers got it from?

They were reading the Fathers like a guy.

And so Calvin and Luther, they're like, hey, that's what, that's what, that's what Augustine has.

That's what John Chrysostom says.

They cited the Fathers and so don't.

See, this is the thing they will tell you.

We're the Church of the, of the Fathers.

No, they're not.

Because a lot of father's taught like penal substitutionary atonement.

The Eastern Church rejects all that.

So again, this is why, like you pointed out, church history is so important.

It is, it is because I, I dialogue with even, even family members and just staunch, you know, in, in my family, some staunch Catholics.

And they really don't, they really don't.

They don't know the church fathers.

And then when I asked him a question, such as one family member had said, oh, Luther came along and stripped the books out of the Bible.

And I asked him, I said, what about Jerome?

That, that said this was second canon.

Why don't he call it first canon Cricket?

Cricket?

I said, please answer, please answer.

And he said, I don't have to answer your questions.

I said, but if you send me something that's, that you're claiming to be a fact and I rebut it with someone you consider to be like a church father, then you have to respond to this.

And yet you don't, because you can't.

Right, Right.

So not knowing church history, he's just, you know, what they're doing is, yeah, they just regurgitate YouTube videos and they, they're kind of all sitting at the same table like you said.

Yeah, they're sharing notes.

And you know, even Luther, for example, is, that's a, that is a straw man because Luther said that the books of the Apocrypha are useful, but they're not binding on the conscience of God's people.

They're not inspired.

They're not to be taken to determine doctrine.

So if you go to a Lutheran church, look at their Bibles, they have the Apocrypha usually at the end or in the middle.

And, and Luther, Luther had no issue with the Apocrypha.

He just said, look, it's not Scripture.

And, and that's because the Church of England held the same view that the Apocrypha is useful for reading but not to determine doctrine.

It's not inspired.

Jerome said the same thing.

It's the same thing that Jerome said.

So all the Fathers of the Church that knew Hebrew, like Jerome, Melito Sardis, Athanasius, of course, Origen later was condemned as a heretic.

But anyone who studied Hebrew, they all said the same thing.

We believe in the canon of the, of the Jewish people.

And so those who didn't, like Augustine, didn't know the languages.

He was a great, he was a great thinker, a philosopher, but Augustine did not know the languages, unlike his, his colleague Jerome.

And so Augustine thought the, the Apocrypha was part of the ancient Church, but he didn't know Hebrew, he didn't know the languages.

So we got to cut them some slack.

We recognize the Fathers are fallible men, mistakes, and some very, very egregious mistakes, too.

Yeah, I, I think it was either Michael Hagen or Michael Krueger that described how we got the Bible.

Like Rome thinks that they, that they are like a thermostat that they set and the Orthodoxy.

Right.

Like they set the temperature and said these are, these are the books that comprise God's word versus, you know, biblical Christians will look and, and see it like, like a thermometer.

Just recognize the temperature.

These are the books, right?

That's right.

Some recognize, you know, which is true.

And others say, no, we're.

We're setting, we're setting the temperature.

Yeah, that was helpful for me, you know, at least as an analogy, you know, to understand.

And maybe some of our listeners, maybe that help you understand the differences between the two as well.

So they, they reject Sola Scriptura.

And I read that they discourage reading scripture in the vulgar tongue, in, in the, in the common language.

So what, what Luther did, writing it in German, what Tyndale did, penning it in English, they did.

They had the same mindset as, as sort of all the, the, the church leaders at the time, that all these common people shouldn't be able to read the Bible.

Right, Right.

And that was the same thing that happened in, in the Eastern Church.

I mean, today, now they do have English translations.

I have here the Greek Orthodox Study Bible, and they use the new King James Version, which is strange because it's a Protestant translation.

Really?

Yeah, they have the, the Greek Orthodox study Bible.

And as I said, they, they followed the text of Nelson Publishers the New King James Version, which I found hilarious because it's funny.

Based on the Hebrew.

The Old Testament is based on the, the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the Greek Orthodox Church still follows the Septuagint, the Greek version.

So, so in, in terms of the people, the general view is that if the Church alone possesses authority and, and she alone dictates what the Bible is, then she alone is the sole infallible interpreter of the Bible.

So very much like Rome, which claims that no, no one can rightly interpret Scripture except Mother Church, and Mother Church is composed of the Pope in, in union with the Magisterium.

Right.

I just find it interesting that in the Roman Catholic Church they've only infallibly interpreted six passages from the New Testament.

That's it.

So everywhere else, when our Roman Catholic friends are using other parts of the Bible to prove Catholicism, I ask them, is that your private interpretation?

Because Rome has not infallibly interpreted that passage.

This is based on your own private interpretation, the very accusation that they make against Protestants.

Well, in Eastern Orthodoxy, they would tell you the same thing, that the average person cannot understand the Bible.

And that's why to them, it's not about Bible reading.

It's all about going to the service.

It's all about chanting, it's all about doing their prayers.

Not so much reading the Bible.

So that's one thing that Rome and the east hold in common.

Yeah.

Because.

Well, I mean, when Peter and Paul, when you read the Epistles and it says to the saints of Ephesus and Philippi and so on and so forth, how did they interpret the Bible without a mat, Without a Magisterium?

Right, exactly.

Just, it was just a letter.

And obviously if Paul, Peter, if they wrote these letters to the churches, I mean, it's because they would read it.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and so the, the implication is that they'll not only read it, but they'll understand it.

And they didn't need Paul there to tell you, okay, this is what I infallibly meant when I said that women will be saved in childbearing, as he says in First Timothy.

And so he doesn't have to be there.

I mean, it's very clear that he's expecting his readers to understand.

I mean, Even Peter in second Peter 3:16 admits there are some things that are hard in Paul, in our brother Paul's writings, some of them are hard to understand.

And then he points out how the, the, the, the false teachers, they distort them to their own destruction.

But the point is that Peter is not saying, oh, wait, you know, you need an infallible interpreter to tell you.

Even Peter had trouble understanding some of Paul's stuff.

As you know, Paul's a very deep thinker, deep theologian.

And so you don't get this sense of this infallible authority.

And the only people who talk like this, really think about it, are those who want to maintain power.

And so church has the power and then she alone has the sacraments to confer grace.

Then that means you are dependent upon the Church for your salvation.

You can't obtain grace unless she conveys it to you through baptism, you know, through penance and the Holy Eucharist and so forth.

And so, you know, the idea that, you know, it's that the old saying is that, is that you, you, you, you lay the egg, you know, you, you, you lay the egg, you hatch it and then you dispatch it.

And so the idea is your whole life is surrounded around the Church.

You're baptized in it as an infant, and then at the end of your life, it's the Church that gives you the, you know, extreme unction or the last rite, so to speak.

So, so when you become dependent on the Church for your salvation, then no wonder they, they make an idol out of it.

They, they've confused the head, which is Christ, with the body.

Yes, basically, there is no head or there's just the church.

And so the church in Christ becomes virtually synonymous.

Them.

And that is why everything is the church, the church, the church, the true church, because they really believe that.

They compare it to the ark, Noah's Ark, for example.

You got to be in the ark in order to be saved.

If you're not in the ark, you're going to be condemned.

And so they rob Christ of his glory.

Because the ark is a type of Christ, right?

It represents Christ who saves us from the wrath of God.

And of course, it's, it's the Lord that closes the door of the ark.

It's God that closes the, the, the, the time of grace that this, this day of grace is going to, is going to end.

There's a termination point where God will shut that door, and that's it.

Yeah, so, yeah, so they rob all the types.

You know, the Ark of the Covenant is Mary.

No, the Ark of the Covenant is Christ Himself, Himself.

On and on it goes.

So it really is a, a robbing, a robbery, a robbing of Christ's rightful dignity and his sovereignty.

But second Timothy 3:16, right?

This is the only mechanism given to us that it says is breathed out by God.

And if it makes us complete.

Yes.

Where's all the, then, then all this stuff that they're saying, traditions.

If you're already complete, you can't add to, you can't add more water if, if the cup is already overflowing.

Right.

And you know, and you know as well that only the Scriptures are called the.

Paul uses the Greek word theonostas only the only thing that is called God breathed are the Scriptures.

Right.

Even the Fathers of the Church, like you read, Ignatius, Irenaeus, these early apostolic fathers, and they're all saying, I am not an apostle.

So Irenaeus says I'm not like Peter and Paul.

They gave Scripture, they were inspired apostles.

He says, I am not an apostle.

They distinguished themselves from the apostles.

They recognized that only the writings of the prophets and the apostles were Scripture.

And they said, as Athanasius said, in these alone are found the fountains of salvation whereby a man is made wise unto salvation in Christ Jesus.

And so even the fathers of the Church are saying Scripture alone.

I love Augustine.

Augustine says that if you're reading Scripture, the one thing we must never say about Scripture is that it is an error.

He says if there's some debate or an error in interpretation, he says it's either due to number one, it's either we have misread the text or two, there's a variant in the text, describable variant, that's in the text.

But we must never say that Scripture is errant.

It is.

So the Fathers of the Church had a very high view of Scripture.

John Chrysostom encouraged people to read their Bibles at home, to read them.

Just think of the very church that says, no, no, no, no, the common people, you shouldn't be reading the Bible.

Chrysostom is like, he's talking, we're talking like one of the greatest church fathers in the history of the church, whom the Eastern Orthodox admire highly.

And he said, read your Bibles, study your Bibles.

So he encouraged Bible study.

And so all of this has been eclipsed, it's been shrouded by modern day Eastern Orthodox polemics.

Yeah.

Because how do they, I mean, how do they not not read these, these guys in their own language and what they've said and, and one of my pet peeves is they, they've like, they think that the church fathers belong to them.

Right.

And obviously they're cherry picking certain things and like, but I mean did is it that they just don't know, were they glossing over they, or they just leaving things out that goes against their, their doctrine.

Like what do you think's happening there?

They're believing, they believe everything the church tells them.

So if the church tells them that the, the fathers are all Orthodox, they'll believe it.

And if I quote a church father that supports penal substitutionary atonement, they'll say, oh, you're just quote mining.

Or, or they'll say you're just, you're just a cherry picking.

And it's, it's like, well, if you want me to quote, you know, the whole volume of John Chrysostom, how many days do you have?

Yeah, strap in.

Yeah, you quote relevant passages.

The gist.

The, the, the, the ones that are to the point.

And so they will accuse you of doing that because you're not part of the Orthodox Church, you see, you're not part of this one true church.

And yet when I debated an Eastern Orthodox gentleman a couple of months ago, I kept bringing up the Fathers and quoting them and all he can say is, I'm quote mining.

Well, show me where this church father said something different than what I just said.

So for example, I quoted Irenaeus middle of the second century, about 150.

He tells us that Jesus was 50 years old when he died.

And he claims that he got that from apostolic tradition.

That is the first time that word apostolic tradition is used is in Irenaeus.

And he tells us that the apostles passed down to the church that Jesus Christ was 50 years old.

And I asked him, I said, do you believe that Jesus Christ was 50 years old when he died?

And he went silent and he said, no, he was 33.

I said, right?

I said, I don't know any Protestant scholar, Roman Catholic scholar, Eastern Orthodox scholar that would say that Jesus was 50 years old.

Now Irenaeus was a fallible man, but here's the thing.

He said he got it from the apostles, right?

So if he says that he got it from the apostles and you believe in apostolic tradition, why don't you believe Jesus 50 years old?

Because the biblical evidence shows he was 33.

And so what does this teach us?

Number one?

Do I, do I, you know, toss Irenaeus out?

Well, no, you don't toss the baby out with the bath water.

I look at Irenaeus and say, he's a brother in the Lord.

He was fallible.

And he was using the number 50 because you know, in the Greek mind, 50 was the, the age of wisdom and so forth.

So he based it on this Greek view of, of the.

The golden age, which was when a man reaches the age of 50.

But I would have.

I would have just, you know, passed it on.

But the fact that he says he got that from apostolic tradition, I asked my, my, my debate opponent, I said, do you believe the apostles passed that on to the Church?

And he said, no.

I said, so then why do you believe all the other guys who said they got this and this and this and this from the apostles?

Because this early father was telling us something he got from the apostles that you and I don't even believe in.

Right.

And that's because they're not infallible.

The Scriptures alone are infallible.

Yes.

I mean, even In John chapter eight, they said that Jesus, you're not even 50 years old.

Right,.

But that's where he got it from is this idea that, oh, why would they say that unless Jesus was approaching the age of 50?

And that, of course, is not what they're saying.

They're saying even 50 years old, you're not even.

So how would you know, Abraham?

Now, do you think that they read more of the Church Fathers or more of Scripture?

What they read most of is not so much the fathers, unless they're scholars or they're priests or bishops.

What they read mostly is liturgy, the liturgy of the Church.

Okay, so there's.

There's the Liturgy of John Chrysostom that they, that they usually read.

But even John Chrysostom, there's so much about John Chrysostom that.

So, for example, I don't know if you've ever been in an Eastern Orthodox Church.

Have you been in one?

I. I walked into one, but not during a service.

Okay, so.

So at the front, you'll notice there's this separating wall.

It's called the Iconostasis.

And it's got icons of Christ and Mary and the child and, and saints and angels.

Well, that's called an iconostasis.

It's what separates the priests from the people.

Well, that didn't develop until hundreds of years later after, Even after the schism, it was not even there.

And, and in the time of John Chrysostom, there was no such thing as an iconostasis.

John Chrysostom would never have.

If he saw one of them, he's go, what is this?

In other words, when you look at John Chrysostom, the church that he was presiding over was.

And the word Chrysostom, I don't know if you know this.

It actually means golden mouth, because he was considered the great preacher and even the people preach, he got the attention of the crowds.

But if you look at the church in his day, it looked nothing like the Eastern Orthodox Church today.

Right.

So there's a lot of anachronism that goes on with our Eastern Orthodox friends.

They'll try to say, well, what you see today is what was going on back then.

No, it was not.

Just like Rome.

Rome has.

Rome has changed.

And.

And she's nothing like what you would see, for example, in, in.

Yeah.

I mean, there are people that are just convinced that nothing has ever changed.

It is.

It is the same from when this apostle stepped foot in this building.

Yeah.

So if you remember.

Does that sound familiar, though?

Is that what the Muslims say about the Quran?

No word has changed.

It's the same Quran preserved since the days of Muhammad.

No, the dot, the letter, no changes.

So it's the same old claim.

And you know the old saying, if it's too good to be true, it's.

Yeah.

And, you know, I looked up.

I don't know if it was in Sam's book.

I think it was in Sam's book that.

And especially young men are flocking to this.

Yeah.

Why do you think this is?

Yeah, I wrote several articles for Christ Overall.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Christ overall dot com, I think, or dot org.

Anyway, I'm not, but I am now.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I believe.

Anyway, they got a whole bunch of us to write articles on the Eastern Orthodox Church.

And I did a podcast with Stephen Wallam and a couple of others, and they even told me, they said they never saw the degree of vitriol in the common sections than when we started talking about Eastern Orthodoxy.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so when we look at the Eastern Orthodox Church, we need to understand, first of all, they only constitute about 1% of Eastern Orthodox in America.

You just look it up.

They only make only 1% of the US population.

So when the ortho bros are telling me, man, we're taking over, we're expanding, we're taking over all you Evangelical Protestant churches.

And I say, well, 1%, that's not overwhelming.

And the other thing is that if you remember Hank Hanegraaff, yes, he was converted.

Yeah.

The Greek Orthodox is part of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

But when he converted, I contacted CRI and I said, well, why would you call him the Bible answer man?

You should call him The Orthodox answer man.

And they refused to let him go.

And I said, but he's not teaching what Walter Martin taught.

Right.

Teaching a completely different gospel.

So anyway, long story short, I mentioned in my article not only Hank Hannegraft, if you remember, Francis Schaefer's son, Frank Schaefer had left his father's ministry, converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church of America.

And then he actually left and became an atheist.

So those were big, like, those were big issues back in the day.

But then there was news coming out, I think it was USA Today that was talking about just droves of young evangelicals flocking into these north of the church.

And the reason for that is a couple of things.

Number one, evangelical Christianity, as you know, you know, even the word evangelical is a bit of, a, bit of a vacuous term, isn't it?

Sure, yeah.

What, what the report said was that most of these Protestant converts were looking at their own churches and they found that the evangelical church that they were part of were becoming irrelevant.

They found that they were becoming very cultural.

They were becoming more like the world, you know, like, like the secret sensitive churches.

That's, that's the, these words that you're speaking right now are, are almost verbatim from what I just heard from a lady that supports our ministry and her daughter in law.

I mean, these are, these are the exact words you used.

Yeah.

And, and they're flocking to them because they find that the evangelicalism has become effeminate.

Yes.

The feminization of the evangelical churches.

And in many respects they're correct.

And of course that is the fault of the pastors of these churches that.

Sure.

Preaching the word of God in season and out of season.

They've succumbed to the world like Rick Warren and his whole, you know, church and purpose driven life.

What that has done is it's created a poison.

And I, way back in the day when they were introducing Rick Warren's works, I was warning the evangelical churches here in Canada about the, the, the onslaught that this was going to cause in an exodus of young Protestant Christians out of these churches.

So they're told that the Eastern Orthodox churches, they're masculine, they stand for the truth, and we are the ancient church and we go back to Jesus Christ and the apostles and we gave you the Bible.

And so a lot of these young folks are impressionable.

They want to be part of a church that is part of tradition, a very long tradition.

They want to be part of a church that is masculine.

They want to be part of A church that has this allure to it.

You've got the chanting, you've got the iconography, you've got the incense, you know, the very things that allure our senses.

And of course, they've forgotten.

The most important thing is that faith does not come by seeing.

It doesn't come by viewing icons and smelling incense in your nostrils, but faith by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ or the word of God.

So the allure is there.

And, and, and, and to be honest with you, I've been in some evangelical churches where I've been invited to speak.

And, you know, the women dress immodestly.

They're not dressed modestly.

Sure.

It's like a catwalk, you know, in a Paris fashion show.

Music.

Some of the contemporary music is just so flaccid.

It lacks those rich old hymns that were pregnant with theology of grace, God's sovereignty, amazing love, how can it be that Thou, my God, should die for me?

These deep, deep words, this contemporary bringing Hillsong Bethel music into the churches, all of that watered down evangelicalism.

And so what happens is people become disillusioned and they go to church and, you know, the Lord's Supper is treated like it's just, you know, just pass around this bread and this cup and, you know, let's just eat and drink and nothing about, you know, what, what all that means and how it unites us, Christ, in the remembrance of his death and resurrection.

So we've done it to ourselves.

And I'm saying all of us like you and I, there's space out there.

But overall, most Christian churches today in the Reformed or the evangelical tradition, some of their churches are not only closing down, Muslims are buying them and converting them to mosques.

Yes.

Happening all over.

Even in the state of New York, you hear these old churches, beautiful buildings being purchased by Muslims and converted to churches.

And that's because the churches have, for the most part, failed.

And they're not giving these young people food.

They're not teaching these people, as Paul said in 1st Corinthians 16, act like men, be men, men of the gospel.

And so that.

That is primary.

That's the primary reason that was given in that article I told you about.

So what I'll do is I can send you the links to that.

Please do.

Yes, absolutely.

Very good articles there.

Amen.

Amen.

Yeah, it is really Sad, all these seven, 11 songs, seven words, 11 times with no theology at all.

And these great hymns of the faith is deep.

Theology is not there because we have People have to learn through the preaching of God's word, and they have to sing the truths, you know, of the doctrines, too.

And, and, and both of those should be connected, you know, if you will, in a service.

But it's not happening in.

I mean, the.

So I live in the Bronx and I go to a church in Queens because I didn't know any really biblical solid churches in the area.

And once I left the Assemblies of God, once I left Pentecostalism, because I was looking more and more into Reformed theology, and I.

There was nowhere for me to go because everything else was like paper and plastic and I wanted.

I wanted something solid.

Exactly, exactly.

So, you know, after, after you've had steak, you know, you don't want Spam.

Right.

It tastes good and it's, it fills your belly and it's protein, high in protein.

And so, you know what Bible says in Hebrews where it says, you know, when you are, when you should be eating meat, you're still, you're still drinking milk.

Yes.

Christian maturity, this is part of the church, is to equip the saints with tools for ministry, is that we mature into.

Into mature adults in Christ.

And unfortunately, what's happening is most of these Christians and these evangelical churches are.

They're still eating oatmeal.

They're eating Pablo.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

That's the, that's the problem.

It's true.

It's true.

So in, in terms of what they believe in salvation, I understand they believe Adam fell because of gluttony, and if he would have just continued on, him and Eve would have been brother and sister forever.

Well, they believe that Adam, when he sinned.

And remember, they hate the doctrine of predestination.

In fact, when some Protestants, when they convert Eastern Orthodoxy, they ask them to recant and to renounce predestination.

And that's because of Cyril Lucaris, the patriarch I told you about, who became a Reformed Christian.

They hate that doctrine.

And so the very thought that God foreknew that Adam and Eve would.

Would fall and that he would use it for his glory, they.

Going there.

But the idea there is that when Adam sinned, they.

They treat it as.

As something that he doesn't pass that.

That Adamic nature to his progeny.

So they don't believe in original sin.

Right.

So their creeds mention it.

It's funny, some of their later creeds do mention the word original sin, but technically speaking, they don't believe that we inherit Adam's guilt.

Excuse me, his sin.

They say we we may have, we have ancestral guilt that we.

What Adam did, but that they, they don't believe.

You and I are born in a, in a fallen nature.

And so in a sense, they're almost Pelagian.

They think that you're born with this tabula rasa, this clean slate, right?

Then later on you choose to sin.

And so the major problem there, and this affects their view of the atonement, is that Adam's sin and Christ's righteousness are parallels to our union with Adam on the one case, and our union with Christ.

So we are born under Adam number one, and then in salvation we come under Adam number two, the last Adam.

And so the first man, Adam, Paul says in Romans 5, sin came into the world.

Sin plunged us into, into rebellion.

But the last Adam, through his obedience, he brings righteousness.

So they believe that if Adam and Eve never sinned, then they would have, obviously they would have lived forever with God on this temple, in the temple of Eden and so forth.

But they don't like penal substitutionary atonement.

They don't like this idea that Christ dies and receives the wrath of God, even though the fathers taught that, like Hippolytus of Rome and John Chrysostom talked about this.

And therefore the atonement to them is, is based on what's called the, the Christus, the Christus victor model, which means Christ is victor conquered death, he conquered Hades, conquered hell, and therefore Christ victoriously conquered Satan on the cross and made it possible for you and I to be baptized and, and go through a process where we reach what's called theosis, where you become like God.

And, and therefore the idea that Christ suffered a, A, a substitutionary death, they don't talk about that.

And that's, and, and this is where we're getting into the other gospel, because once you, you reject that Christ dies as the atonement for sinners and, and as the representative, then what happens to the question of God's justice, the, the moral demands of God's law?

And, and that is why their view of the atonement is deficient.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, but we see the atonement all the way, all the way in the Old Testament.

And how can you read Isaiah 53 and walk away holding to Eastern Orthodox doctrine instead of biblical doctrine?

Yeah, I mean, it says in Isaiah 53, it pleased the Lord to crush him.

It pleased the Lord to crush the Messiah.

And, you know, Piper wrote a book on the pleasures of God and, and he mentions how one of the pleasures of God was in crushing his son to make him a sin offering for sin.

And, and, and so see, as evangelical Protestants, we, we have no problem with the idea of Christ as victor.

Yes, Christ gained victory, right?

It says that he conquered his enemies.

He made a full display of them.

Colossians 2.

Christ conquered the grave.

He has the keys of Hades and death.

But it's not just that the atonement has so much.

There was the ransom theory that Christ had to pay a ransom.

Some fathers suggested he paid the ransom to the devil.

But how could he pay off the devil to redeem us, right, the devil.

The ransom was paid to God, God's party.

God is offended by our sin.

So Christ pays the ransom.

He satisfies the justice of God.

But the death of Christ is not just ransom.

It's also penal substitutionary.

There's satisfaction.

You know, Saint Anselm of Canterbury spoke about the atonement as the satisfaction.

God was satisfied with the sacrifice of Christ because Christ paid the penalty we could not pay.

So we take the all inclusive the view that the atonement is not just penal substitutionary, it is victory.

It is this.

God is satisfied.

Christ propitiated the wrath of God.

And so the, the Eastern Orthodox view in my view is very reductionistic.

It's myopic and takes away from the beauty of, of the atonement of Christ.

I love that.

And I was reading that they believe it's better to sin against God than against their leaders who propitiate for them.

Yeah.

And it sounds like the rabbis, because in the Talmud it says that it's okay to disobey the scriptures, but whoever.

And it's okay to mock the scriptures, but whoever mocks the rabbis will be punished in Gehenna in boiling excrement.

And so even the Jewish rabbinic writings tell you that if you mock the, the, the scribes.

Now there's a bit of a tongue in cheek there, isn't there?

Who do you think they're pointing to when they say whoever mocks the scribes and the elders, the, that this is their goal?

Well, Jesus of Nazareth, right, mocked them for following the traditions of men.

And that's why in the rabbinic literature Jesus is said to be also suffering in boiling excrement in, in Ghana.

Yeah.

And, and I mean even though they, they, they're painted under different names, Rome, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, they all end up in the same place in one sense or another.

Like when you look at sort of the, the principles that they espouse and then they push and drive, they all end up at the same place.

So if they're all doing the same thing,.

What.

What stands out is.

Is a shining Christ alone.

This is what is different from everything else.

All the world religions are here, you know, on.

On the left.

And, and you only have biblical Christianity on the right side.

It's the only thing that's different.

Yeah, I mean, think of it.

Every religion in the world, without exception, with the exception only of the Christian faith.

Yes.

Works, righteousness, all of it.

All of it.

And so, you know, there's all.

There's two types of religions.

The.

There's the religion of the dew and the of the done.

Yes.

All world religions.

Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism.

It's all do, do, do.

And in the end, right, brother?

It is do, do in the end, right?

Because what does Isaiah say?

All our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.

But there's only one that is done.

And that is the cry of the one who hung on the cross of Calvary for sinners.

And he.

It is done, it is consummated, it is finished, it's tetelesti, paid in full.

And so the religion, as Spurgeon said, it's the religion of Cain, the religion of works, trying to please God with the works of our hands.

And yet what did Abel trust in?

He trusted in the blood of the Lamb, that he.

He trusted in the blood.

And so the.

The sons of Cain, Spurgeon said, are constantly fighting with the sons of Abel.

Those who depend on always attacking the one and seeking to kill them.

I mean, Cain killed his own brother Abel.

They destroy the sons of Abel because we plead the blood.

You know, we have no righteousness.

We know we come to God with nothing in our hands.

We trust in his grace and his righteousness.

But all the religions are about, you need to please God by doing A, B, C, D. So it doesn't matter whether it's Judaism or Hinduism or Islam, Roman Catholicism, it's the same, same methodology.

You need to work for your salvation.

And because there is no.

Because it depends on you.

There is no blessed assurance.

There is no assurance of salvation.

They don't have it.

We'll send you to purgatory if you've committed venial sins, if a mortal sin, too bad you're going to hell even though you were justified at baptism and God's golden chain of redemption has been broken, he will not go glorify the one whom he's called because there is no real salvation.

It's all possible.

Salvation is not an actuality in the death of Christ.

Christ died to make salvation possible, but not certain.

And I'm talking about Rome and Arminianism and so forth.

But in the case of Eastern Orthodoxy, they don't believe that they have assurance.

Some of them, that's why they want to be possessed by devils in this world, so that they can suffer now so that you don't have to suffer in the next life.

And so it's either pay now or you pay later.

Just.

Yeah, well, I'm.

I'm loving preaching through first John because it's all about assurance of salvation.

Exactly.

The whole thing.

So if you can't know, then either John was wrong or all you guys are wrong.

Did you notice in John how many times he says that you may know that you may.

40.

Yeah, it's actually 40.

I actually, my first sermon was an overview of the book of John, and I read every single verse where he says, you can know he used the word for.

He used the word no 40 times.

Exactly.

It's not this blind faith.

I'll just jump, you know, take a blind leap of faith.

No, you can know.

And you know my favorite passage First John 5, 13.

Yes.

Things that you may know that you have eternal life and you have it now in Christ.

Yes, yes.

Now, all of this icon veneration, like, if you reject this, they anathematize you.

If you reject it and you call it idolatry.

Can you speak to that?

Yeah.

So the last of the.

Of the ecumenical councils, the last one, was in 787 AD, and it was called the Second Council of Nicaea.

And in there, they were defending what's called iconodulia, the.

The veneration of icons now in the church, going way back to Justin Martyr, even Origen, Tertullian.

It's very clear in the first 300 years of the Church that the early fathers rejected any representations of God or Christ.

And in churches, they were totally against the images.

They compared it to what the pagans did with their gods and so forth.

And it's not until you get around the late 400s, early 500s, that you have this move to have images in the churches.

The word icon means image in Greek.

Right.

And so what ends up happening is you have this.

What's called the iconoclast movements.

So there's Christians literally getting rid of all these pictures out of the churches and saying, this is idolatry.

It's a violation of the second commandment of the decalogue.

And so they.

They even have councils like the Council of Hierarch of Hierarch Sorry.

And in that council, they condemn the use of images and churches.

Now what ends up happening is there's, there's those who are for it and those who are against it, and there's constant warfare between these two and it's very bloody as well.

And then in 787, the Empress Irene, she was the only female emperor in Byzantium.

The Empress Irene is a fan of icons.

And so what she does is she not only sends her armies to butcher all those old dissidents who didn't believe in icons, she even had her own son, Constantine, I think Constantine vi.

She had her own son imprisoned, who was the heir to the throne.

She had him in prison and had his eyes gouged out.

This is a.

Who does this?

And so in the second Council of Nicaea, it basically says that anyone who calls the veneration of icons idolatry or a, or a violation of the second commandment, let them be anathema.

And then it says this, whoever does not kiss the icons with adoration, anathema.

So you and I are both anathematized by the Eastern Orthodox Church because we do not embrace icons.

We don't kiss the icons with veneration.

We appeal to the second commandment against the use of idols and images in the Church.

So you and I are anathematized by that council.

And so that is the position of the Eastern Orthodox Church even unto this day.

Now Rome accepts it as well, but it wasn't accepted into a little later in the 800s when Rome officially accepted it.

But what's interesting about the Roman Church is that they were okay with images being used for instructional purposes.

The way, you know, our kids go to Sunday school.

So you'll have little books on Jesus, they'll have pictures of biblical characters, they'll say instructional, that's okay.

But what Nicaea too was saying was not just non instructional, but veneration.

So they come up with these words like veneration and Latria, dulia, Latria.

So we give only Latria to God.

Same with the Roman Catholics.

We venerate the saints, we venerate Mary, you know, hyperdulia, but we only give Latria to God.

Now here's the problem.

The Bible makes no distinction between these words.

There is no these distinctions between, well, you can venerate this, but that's not worship.

So why would Moses have all these Israelites killed in the wilderness?

For, for venerating a calf, a golden calf that they thought was Yahweh, who brought them out of Egypt.

Right.

Just have them all killed.

I mean, couldn't they have said Moses, don't get, don't, you know, don't get your Calvins in the knot.

We're not worshipping, we're not doing Latria to this calf, we're venerating it.

And so that's the type of language you have, is that, well, you know, I can kiss an icon, I can pray to Mary, the icon of Mary.

But that's not worship, that's veneration.

But yet you're using the expressions of worship, like prayer, singing hymns, invocation.

These are all.

I mean, the psalms are filled with what?

Prayers to God, Praises to God.

Right.

The language that they came up with had no biblical support.

It was forced through by imperial decree.

And therefore just much like corrupt judges today, you know, forced, force legislation out on the people.

That's what happened at the second council of Nicaea was this imperial decree that anyone in the empire who does not do this, they're anathema.

Now remember, the word anathema is the same word Paul uses in Galatians 1:69.

To be under the divine curse of God.

Right.

Say things like, no, no, no, no, no.

Anathema just means you're not part of us.

No, no, it means to be under the divine curse of God.

They try to soft shoe it.

Yes.

In, in this day and age.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah.

And so they, they have no authority to do that.

And I was also thinking of when in the wilderness when they looked at the bronze serpent and, and then they were healed, which is obviously a picture of looking toward Christ.

And Christ used that in John 3.

Eventually, when they were going to worship that thing, they smashed, they smashed the bronze serpent.

Hezekiah, King Hezekiah had it broken and destroyed.

I mean, talk up, talk about a relic from the past that Moses constructed.

I mean, this thing that would be the envy of all museums in the world.

Right?

They call the, the Jews were worshiping it, calling it Nehushtan and they were burning incense to it.

And, and you know, they could have said, Hezekiah, what's your problem?

We're not worshiping, we're venerating this.

Venerating it.

No, Hezekiah says they'll bring this up.

They'll say, well, look, the Ark of the Covenant, there were the cherubim on top of the ark.

I said, yeah, they were there for symbolic purposes.

They were not venerated.

The high priest was too terrified to go into the holy of holies only once a year.

So he only saw it once a year.

I mean, this is a 365 day veneration of the Ark of the Covenant.

They only saw it once a year on the day of Atonement.

And, and, and the high priest was trembling when he went in there because he's going into the very presence of God, the blood on the mercy seat.

So he didn't go in there to venerate these cherubim on the arks lid.

He went in there to put the, the blood in there and, and with incense and then get out.

And so this idea that, well, in Solomon's Temple they had cherubim engraved into the, into the veils and so forth.

Yeah, but there's nothing in there that the priests were worshiping them or venerating those things.

So there's a difference between the, the ornaments that were in the temple which were just pointing forward by the way, battles, pointing to the reality.

The priests were too busy offering up sacrifice to God on behalf of the people, not going around venerating these pictures.

So when they say this, I'm sure you heard this, Bill, when people say, well look, I have a picture of my wife here and I carry it with me and, and, and then, you know, when I'm on a long trip, I'll, I'll kiss her picture, that's what we do with the icons.

Well, here's the problem.

The context is completely different.

The context is this is your wife and this is a picture of your wife.

You're married to her.

This is a marital relationship.

In a religious context, everything becomes the worshiper and the worship that is God.

In a religious context, you cannot make representations of God and, and kiss them as if they were God.

That's a completely different context.

One is marital, the other one is, is a, is a religious worship context.

Yeah.

The one thing, because I teach archeology at the university, one thing that archaeologists have never uncovered, there's only one exception, they have never uncovered anything of the ancient Temple of Israel.

The one thing that distinguished Jerusalem Temple or the Tabernacle in the wilderness from all the Canaanite temples and shrines was they didn't have a picture of Yahweh.

They didn't have a depiction of the God of Israel.

And when we do find it, we find it in a time period where Israel was in apostasy and worshiping the Asherah and unite the Asherah with Yahweh.

So there is a potsherd that they've discovered where it says Yahweh and his consort, where they're trying to merge Canaanite religion with Yahweh, who's being depicted as a bull with a human head.

And so that's the only exception.

It's in the context of, of the time when Israel was mingling with the nations and they were in a state of apostasy.

That almost sounds like what happened when they, when they built the, the calf idol.

They called it Yahweh.

Yeah, this is, it's the same thing.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

And they, they believe, the Orthodox, they believe that Mary lived in the temple when she was three years old.

Well, they believe that.

No, not at three, but they believe that Mary, when she was a child, her mother, Anna.

The New Testament never tells us who her parents are, but in traditions, you hear her mother was St. Anne and her father was St. Joachim.

And so in a second century work called the Protevangelity of James, which is an apocryphal work, it talks about the story of Anne and Joachim, almost like Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist.

And it talks about how they couldn't have a child.

And then Anne says, and remember the name St. Anne is an offshoot of Hannah, the mother of Saint.

It's a short form before Hannah, the mother.

So she's asking the Lord, if you give me a child, male or female, I'll give my child to the service of the temple.

Sound familiar?

Yes.

Samuel was a boy.

There's a big difference here.

Girls are, are not allowed into the temple, only in the court, in the court of the women.

They can't go beyond that point.

And that's because of the menstrual cycle, because menstruation is considered unclean under the law of Moses.

And where you don't go into a holy place when a girl is in her puberty, going through menstruation.

So the writer of the Protevangelium, of James, of course, didn't know that, because if he was a Jew who was a.

Who was in the first century, he would know.

You don't put little girls in the temple, especially under the care of old men.

And so that's like Muhammad and Aisha, but.

Yeah, exactly.

In the story, it says that they brought her, Mary, to the, to the temple and that she was taken in and that she wove.

She's the one who.

She was a seamstress of sorts, and she wove.

She worked on the veil of the, of the temple that blocked the holy of holies from the holy place.

And, and she's given at the age of 12 and, and angels would come to her and they would feed her.

Now if you look at the Quran, the Quran repeats this story almost word for word.

And the Quran's not getting that from the Bible, it's getting that from the Protevangelium of James.

So here's the question.

The Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox Church does not accept the Protevangelium of James as scripture.

It's not in the 27 book collection of the New Testament.

Why are they going to spurious documents written 100 years or so after Mary's death?

And why would they believe in an apocryphal source to come up with this idea that Mary was given into the temple and to the care of the temple?

So here's the problem.

How can the true church of Jesus Christ, the ancient church of the Apostles, direct us to spurious documents that are clearly apocryphal?

No scholar believes that.

They're based on history and they believe this about Mary.

I've seen icons in Orthodox churches of her going to the temple.

And they're Giving this, the 12 year old Mary to the care of the priests.

And so that's where they get it from.

It's not the new.

They got to go to the Apocrypha, which is terrible.

That, that is terrible.

Wow.

So let Mary was blessed among women, not above women.

Right, that's what, well, that's what you said.

From henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

It's almost like she's a, a co.

Mediator, the ewe lamb.

Well, spot a wrinkle.

And I like to ask, well, if you think she was sinless, were her parents sinless too?

Yeah.

And how far back do we go?

Right, so they don't believe in the Immaculate Conception because they don't believe in original sin.

So the Immaculate Conception means Mary was prevented from inheriting original sin from her.

That she was, she was prevented by the grace of God to inherit that.

And therefore her conception in her mother's womb, she was immaculate.

That is, she was sinless from conception.

In, in the Greek Orthodox or the Eastern Orthodox Church, they believe Mary was sinless, but she was born with the ancestral sin of Adam, but she did not act on it.

And so some Eastern Orthodox believe that some people lived sinless lives.

They think John the Baptist lived a sinless life because he was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb.

So John Mary.

But they also believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary like Rome does.

So they don't believe she had other children.

But here's where Roman and the Eastern church differ.

And it's very interesting.

In the Eastern Church they believe that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are sons and daughters of Joseph from a marriage, from his marriage, riddled he was widowed.

And so Joseph children from his first wife.

So Mary becomes like a stepmom to his children.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the brothers and sisters of Jesus are cousins.

And so in the Roman Catholic Church, Joseph becomes a perpetual virgin.

It's not just Mary, but Joseph, her husband is also a perpetual virgin.

And that is why if you notice Pope John Paul II and then of course Pope Francis and Benedict XVI, they were pushing for the, the, to mention St. Joseph in the Mass.

So, so during the Mass they will, they will mention during the confession about the ever virgin Mary and her virgin groom, St. Joseph.

And so, and so the veneration of St. Joseph is just one step lower than Mary.

So Mary gets hyperdulia and Joseph gets proto dulia.

And then it works down to the saints.

But in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Joseph, he's befuddled.

I mean, if you look at the icons of the birth of Jesus in the Eastern Orthodox Church, you got Mary in a cave, she's holding the Christ child and Joseph's in the corner going, what is this?

What's going on here?

Different than the way they view him in the Western church.

Wow, that, that, that's a new one.

I appreciate learning that.

I didn't know that.

A perpetual virginity for Joseph.

I like to ask the question, is it normal and good and holy to save yourself from, you know, for marriage?

And everybody says yes.

I said, is it normal, good and holy to get married and stay as a virgin?

Right.

Especially when it says be fruitful, multiply.

Yeah.

So you're disobeying God's creation mandate.

And, and, and, and the other thing is you got.

Joseph and Mary are living like roommates and they orders and, and so on.

They're married.

But hey, you know, but, but they don't engage in any, they don't, they don't consummate the marriage.

So the way Rome has it, Joseph and Mary's marriage were, was never consummated, even though.

Yeah.

Until the child was weaned.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, let me ask you this one final question here, all right.

Is you have Walmart and is it Sobeys in Canada?

Yes, yes.

Am I saying that right?

All right, I looked that up.

All right.

You walk into a Walmart or a Sobeys in Canada, you step into an aisle.

You, you.

You know this person who professes orthodoxy and they're dying, they got three minutes to live.

What are you going to tell them before they enter into eternity?

What I tell them, is this the gospel?

Is this that Jesus Christ died for sinners?

He was buried.

He was raised again the third day.

And if you put your trust in him, like the thief on the cross, when he was in his last moments, he turned to Jesus.

No baptism, no church membership, nothing.

All he had was he wanted mercy.

He was at the mercy of the judge of all the earth.

And so he turned to Jesus and said, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

He knew he was a sinner.

He told the other guy, we are sinners.

We're deserving the just desserts of our actions.

But this man has done nothing wrong.

He acknowledged Jesus was king because you can't have a kingdom without a king.

And so he put his trust in the Lord Jesus.

And Jesus gave him the promise.

Today you shall be with me in paradise.

And so my, my, my, my comment to that is put, put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

If you believe in the Lord Jesus, you and your household will be saved.

And, and that's all you've got is the grace of God and the mercy of God.

And I think the Thief on the Cross is one of the most beautiful stories where you have the grace of God there without works.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, so, Tony, I really appreciate your time.

We plan to do another podcast on this topic again, but with a special guest at Orthodox Priest, which I actually attended a Bible college with.

And although we both left that denomination of Pentecostalism, we both went in very different directions.

So I'm in a Reformed church and he is in Eastern Orthodoxy and trying to pull others in the same.

Now, let me just ask you, what resources might you recommend for people on this?

You mentioned a website already.

Can you just mention that again for us?

It's Christ overall.

Now, I don't know if it's.com or.org, but it's Christ overall, and I think it's.com because.

Yeah, I'm looking it up.

It should have a.

A red.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So Christ overall, there's a whole.

The month of, of May was completely dedicated to Eastern Orthodoxy.

It's not just myself, there's many others who contributed, so I would encourage you to read those articles there.

The other thing I would do is also recommend.

There's a book by Robert Letham, he wrote a book called Through Western Examining Eastern Orthodoxy Through Reformed Eyes.

And so a Reformed Perspective on Eastern Orthodoxy.

That's a very good book.

It's very, very layperson oriented.

So I would encourage that one.

There's another.

Repeat the title of that one.

Yes.

It's called Through Western Eyes.

Through Western Eyes, yeah.

By Robert Letham.

L E T H A M. Okay, got it.

Cover.

It's an orange cover.

And it's a Reformed perspective on Eastern Orthodox Church.

There's another series, the Zondervan.

There's one on.

I think it's called Three Different Views of Orthodoxy.

It's published by Zondervan, and what you have there is Michael Horton is one of the contributors.

He's a, as you know, reformed brother.

And.

And so that one is a dialogue between Reformed Eastern Orthodox.

I think there's a Roman Catholic in there as well.

Who's the author?

Let me see.

Let me just grab the book here.

Let me see here.

And as you're getting that.

Are you familiar with Bodhi Hodge?

No, I'm not.

Okay.

He wrote a book called World Religions and Cults, and in volume one, him and Roger Patterson, they carry it in from Answers in Genesis.

He had some good.

He had a.

A chapter on.

On Orthodoxy that I found helpful.

And here is.

Here's the book.

There's.

Sorry, I got the wrong.

Here's the one I was talking about.

Zonderman.

Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism.

Okay.

And the.

The general editor is Stanley Gundry.

G U N D R Y. Oh, Stanley.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's called Three Views of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism.

And you also had Sam Farad.

Am I saying that right?

It's right here.

You can see it.

Eastern Orthodoxy through the Lens of Sola Scriptura.

Yeah, that's the one.

I've.

I think in two days I read almost the whole book.

Yeah.

And it's published by Free Grace.

Free Grace Press.

Yes.

Amen.

Amen.

The other one I was telling you about, Through Western Eyes by Robert Letham, and it's Orthodoxy A Reformed Perspective.

Very good books.

Yeah.

And of course, the articles on Christ overall.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I. I like to promote resources so people can look further into things.

And obviously, with your degree, you are very well read, and so you know your resources and can promote the.

The good resources for us to know.

So in closing, I want to just thank you for joining us on this top and think about a podcast.

Name of your church, again is.

It's Parklawn Baptist Church in Toronto.

Park Lawn.

All right, so if you're in the area or you have family and friends in the area, send them to the church.

And do you have a website for your church and, or do you have a separate ministry for your apologetics?

I'm working.

Well, we're actually revamping our website now.

We're putting on all that.

So if anyone's interested, they can just go to my YouTube channel.

It's called Toronto, the City of Toronto Apologetics.

And so it's a, it's a, it's a channel that's, that's dedicated to apologetics and I've got a ton of playlists on Eastern Orthodoxy.

My debate there with an Eastern Orthodox apologist is on there.

And so yeah, Toronto Apologetics.

Okay.

Now, is Wes Hoff connected with you?

Well, he, I know him.

He lives in Toronto and is, he's, he's, he's finishing, he's doing his PhD at the University of Toronto.

So we do, he's been on my channel before and we do correspond from time to time, but he's a busy man.

He's traveling all over the place.

And yeah, he's, he's, he's a quite, he's quite busy.

His schedule's pretty, pretty, pretty tight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, if you would pray for us and I'm going to promote this at the same time.

This upcoming Saturday, July 11th, we're going to have something called the New York City Invasion at Union Square where biblically like minded churches will invade an area of New York City with many eclectic people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, their open air preaching, street witnessing and prayer.

So if you're listening, you can go to HTTPs forward slash gb1cls co nyci.

So I want everybody, thank you for taking this time to stop and think about it.

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