Welcome to Day 1416 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Intolerant Apostles and Cryptic Revelations – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1416 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Intolerant Apostles and Cryptic RevelationsInsight Seventy-Five: The Apostles Didn’t Tolerate Aberrant Teaching about the GospelBoth testaments of the Bible bear witness to the problem of competing religious ideas that were contrary to biblical faith and theology. In the Old Testament period, the polytheistic religious systems of the surrounding nations were a persistent threat to Israel’s exclusive loyalty to Yahweh as the true God. That loyalty was the core of Israel’s faith and the basis for salvation in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 6:4 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+6%3A4&version=NLT) Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.


In the New Testament period, idolatry and the danger of worshipping a lesser god was still a target of apostolic teaching and writing. Paul admonished the Corinthians to be careful about eating meat sacrificed to idols, warning them that, in doing so, they were at risk of committing idolatry and fellowshipping with demons (1 Corinthians 10:14-22). Since Paul elsewhere permits eating such meat (1 Corinthians 8:4, 7-9), advising believers not to make a fuss about offerings that were sold in the marketplace (1 Corinthians 10:25), the issue for Paul must have been avoiding any sort of activity that either was participation in the ritual or could be construed that way.


The more significant problem of false teaching, however, seems to involve teachers that professed to follow Jesus but whose teachings altered the simplicity of the Gospel— that salvation was only by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9) and was available to Jews and gentiles alike.Paul and the other apostles repeatedly had to deal with “Judaizers,” who argued that gentiles had to conform to specific points of the Mosaic law to be in right standing before God. Paul referred to those who taught such things as “the circumcision party” and famously confronted Peter for his failure to oppose their teaching (Galatians 2:11-14). Peter knew better but was afraid to speak against Judaizing at Antioch. Paul referred to his behavior as “hypocrisy” that was “out of step with the gospel” (Galatians 2:13-14). The Judaizing seems to have been focused on circumcision (and therefore Jewish identity) since Paul later accuses the Judaizers themselves of being lawbreakers (Galatians 6:13). The point is that they had focused on outward conformity to Jewish identity and not the heart. They presumed that being Jewish meant superior status with God.


Peter himself would later have a