Is Bibi Netanyahu Out as Israel's Prime Minister?

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866-34-TRUTH. We want to focus, though, on the elections in Israel. There is a tremendous amount that's happened.

I want to give you a recap and tell you where we are right now. Many evangelical Christians just know of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and he's kind of like the hero. He's the man. In point of fact, he has served as prime minister longer than any other prime minister in Israel's history, term some years ago, and then recently elected, reelected, reelected. And he is an incredible political campaigner, and he's an incredible politician in terms of fighting for his political career and his life. And he's done much good for Israel. He has helped with Israel's stature in many ways around the world. He has worked to broker peace accords. And of course, when he comes to America and speaks in Congress, I mean, he's a hero.

He's strong. He's a great spokesman also, having studied in America. So he speaks English with a flawless American accent while being an Israeli at the same time. But in point of fact, within Israel, he's not viewed the way evangelical Christians view him in America. Within Israel, he's a much more controversial figure. And just for the record, this is not a big issue to Israelis.

He's married three times, like Trump. There are accusations of corruption and potential trials against him. And what's happened is that even though Israel has gone through four elections in a period of less than two years, even though the Likud party has still gotten the majority of votes in the most recent election, that's Prime Minister Netanyahu's party, and even though the overwhelming votes leaned to the right, the fact is they could not form a coalition government. They could not get enough people together to stand with Netanyahu because he has become so controversial and so divisive. So is he the best thing for Israel?

Or is a unity government the best thing? So let me step back and just go through the last elections with you, all right? Remember, in Israel, you vote for parties, not people. Even though there are party leaders like Netanyahu and Likud, you still vote for parties.

That's how it works. So 120 seats in the Knesset, you need a majority, 61 seats. But because there are so many parties that run, nobody comes anywhere near a majority, which means you have to form a coalition. You have to make a deal with some others, so you get people of like heart, and now you have a coalition government.

You say, so how does it work? You all vote as a block. Well, no, what it means is you form the government and each of you gets a piece that's important to you. I want to be over this aspect of the economy. I want to be over this aspect of the military.

I want to be over this aspect of education. I want to be over this aspect of international relations, whatever the specifics are that, okay, so your party gets to do this and your party gets to do this. And it means, and I've used this analogy, let's say that your kids and you want to play baseball in the street and you've got baseball bat, but you realize, wait, all the baseball we have is like all ripped up. Well, there's another kid, he's not really a good player, but he's got a bunch of bats and really good baseballs, so you have to invite him in.

So he can kind of pick the team he's going to be on even though he's not thinking of the player because he's got the goods here. So you often have these coalition deals where you have a party with only a few votes, but they're the ones that make a final coalition work, so they have to be given certain benefits. Okay, so here's how things worked out in terms of vote getting from the last elections. The various parties, Likud, you can see, got the majority, 30, the largest single block. They got 30 votes, but that's less than half of what they need to form a coalition. So New Hope got six, Yamina got seven, Religious Zionist got six, United Torah Judaism got seven, Shas got nine, Israel Beitenu got seven, Blue and White got eight, Yesh Atid got 17, Maritz got six, Labor got seven, Joint List got six, and Ra'am got four. Ra'am being what ends up being a very, very important part of this equation, just with four seats.

That's the minimum threshold. If you have to get enough votes to get four seats, if you only get enough to get three, two, or one, then you don't get in. So as many parties are here, think we got Republican, Democrat, Independent, maybe, you know, Libertarian, here you got all these different groups. And then you have many others that didn't even get on the map, maybe like another 10 that didn't even get on the map because they didn't get enough votes to get four seats. All right, so Ra'am is an Islamist party, it's an Islamic party, and they end up playing a key role, as you'll see in a moment.

So let's look back at this again. Likud, 30 votes. So they were trying to form a coalition with United Torah Judaism with seven, so that gives 37. Shas, which is nine, that gives 46.

So that's a good group, 46 out of 61. Now, United Torah Judaism and Shas are ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. So they will have very specific goals.

They will want to make sure that the government continues to underwrite them so their men can study and pray all day, and their men will not have to serve in the military. And they will want very specific roles, the Ministry of Interior, so that they can control aspects of Jewish life and restrict messianic Jews coming into the country and make life harder for messianic Jews in the country. So that's part of the key coalition. So there are enough others leaning towards the right. Yamina, Naftali Bennett, that's a right-wing nationalist party.

That should have worked. Religious Zionists, add them in. You know, maybe Yisrael Beitenu, which is nationalist, right, and with a lot of Russian Jews. You know, you should have been able to form a coalition, because Meretz, they're left. Labor, left. Ra'am, Arab Party, would be left.

But most would be right. And yet, Netanyahu could only get to 60. He could not form a coalition government.

And it's just that people wouldn't work with him. Some said if Likud had a different leader, then we'd form a coalition. And Likud's strength has been Netanyahu over these years. So anyway, that's where things stood. He's unable to form a coalition. So now you go to the next party that had the next biggest numbers of votes, and that's Yesh Atid. Hebrew, there's a future. So that's centrist right-leaning.

Okay? And by the way, when we talk in Israel about left, center, right, as a whole, Israeli Jews are more to the right than American Jews. But that means in terms of national security and dealings with the Palestinians and things like that. It does not mean primarily, say, debate about abortion or gay rights, because that's hardly debated in Israel. It's just liberal society in that regard. They're very religious or against these things.

But those are not the subjects of debate. So it's a much more diverse setting there in that regard. And by the way, others that Netanyahu was looking to form a coalition with were so far right-leaning that people considered them extremist and said, now this is going to be a right-wing extremist government. So what happened is, Yair Lapid, who is the leader of Yesh Atid, he worked to form a very unlikely coalition. So here's the breakdown.

Are you ready? We're going to go through this. This is the current government that is being proposed. Now, Netanyahu is still trying to undermine it by saying to people within these different parties, you cannot do this. You've got to step back and still trying to undermine this going forward and saying that there's going to be blood on your hands. That's what some of the others are saying. This is going too far to the left.

It's going to undermine security. But let's look at this. Eight parties now make up the new Israeli coalition.

So Yesh Atid, 17. And again, this is centrist right. Labor, which used to be Labor and Likud, those were the two big parties, like Republican-Democrat, the two big parties.

Labor's shrunk down to almost nothing recent elections. Labor with seven seats and Labor is center-left. Then Meretz, six seats. Meretz would be the furthest to the left in terms of Israeli Jews, but very much to the left. Then, blue and white, so the Kahol Avon, that's the Israeli flag, right? Blue and white, that's centrist right. Then Yamina, which is right and nationalist. Ra'am, that's the Islamist party. Then Yisrael Beiteinu, so center-right but strongly Russian-based. And New Hope, which is centrist right. So it's a little bit more right-leaning than left-leaning, but you do have Meretz, you do have Labor, and then you do have Ra'am. And Yamina, this was Naftali Bennett, and he was very close with Netanyahu, closely associated with him over the years. And he made very clear in campaigning, we will never work with these leftist parties.

We will never form a government with these leftist parties. And yet, the way it's set up, that the two prime ministers, they're going to be alternating after two years, it's going to be Bennett, and then it's going to be Lapid. Some would give Yamina seven seats, you know, some of these numbers work out differently. All right, so we can take the chart down. For those who are watching, well, we had a chart up here to try to sort everything out.

But here's the big deal. You have someone whose party got six or seven seats, that's it. And yet, he is going to serve as prime minister for two years, and then your Lapid of Yesh Atid would serve for two years. So you think, how the world did that happen?

This is down the list. You've got a bunch of parties with similar numbers of votes, or one or two with even more. How is it that he gets up there? Well, because he's right wing and helped form the coalition. But here's what Bennett said.

So as I look at this, I have two reactions. One is, this may be exactly what Israel needs. Otherwise, there's going to be fifth elections.

And with the trauma of the war with Hamas, with everything else going on, with constant threats from Iran, with having to deal with the new Biden administration without really having a strongly functioning, fully functioning government, nobody wants a fifth round of elections. It's just a couple of years. It's crazy. So this could be just what's needed to bring healing to the wounds and to bring some semblance of, look, we got to work together.

It's reality. We got to work together. The flip side is it could speak of dangerous compromise. So I'm going to come back, review this a little bit more and share a bit of what Naftali Bennett said in his, in a speech that he gave was that I think on Sunday, if you have any Jewish related question, give me a call. 866-34-TRUTH. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on the line of fire. It is Thursday, as that beautiful Paul Wilbur music tells you.

866-34-TRUTH. And I do want to give background on a video that we posted confronting Noahad Law hysteria. Just give you a little background to that before we go too long in the show today. So back to the Israeli elections. Naftali Bennett, again, a man that would have been closely associated with Netanyahu over the years, someone that would clearly form a coalition government with Netanyahu, that would certainly not form a coalition government with Meretz, the left-leaning Israeli party or Ra'am, the Islamist party. This would be the first time that an Arab party now would have an active role in a coalition government as opposed to just members of the Knesset that can vote like everyone else, which would mean that certain concessions would be given to them in the process. Right?

So this is the first. So Naftali Bennett made reference to a Jewish tradition and he said, 2000 years ago, we were destroyed because of our divisions. And there's no more time for division.

We have to have healing. So they were noble words and good words when you're saying, look, we're a diverse country with varied viewpoints and backgrounds, and we just have to figure out a way to get along together and work together for the overall good of the nation. So everybody's going to have to make some compromise somewhere. I was on the phone with a journalist today that called for my response to what happened with the elections. And I said, you know, you wonder in America what lessons are learned from this because we're all polarized. I mean, if the right's in, we're going to rule with an iron hand. If the left's in, they're going to rule with an iron hand. I mean, it's just it seems to be we just got to pull the nation one way or the other. And is that ultimately what's going to work?

And, you know, just obvious questions come up. So anyway, here's the Jewish tradition. And in the Talmud, it states that the first temple was destroyed and the Jewish people were in exile for 70 years. And the principal sins were idolatry and injustice and immorality. Now, the second temple was destroyed, and even in Talmudic times, it had lain in ruins for hundreds of years, now almost 2,000 years.

So the Talmud asks the question, well, since we didn't have idolatry and injustice and immorality the same way during the second temple time that we did in the first, why has this destruction and exile been so much longer? And the answer is sinat chinam, baseless hatred. And it goes on to tell the story about factions with these Jewish family and groups and so on. And because of that, that was reflective of baseless hatred in the nation. That's what brought the discussion. Now, when I've looked at it, I've said, yeah, well, it was baseless hatred, baseless hatred rejecting the Messiah. I mean, Jesus said that they'll hate me without a cause, sinat chinam, baseless hatred. But in Jewish tradition, obviously, they don't see it that way. And he was pointing back to that and then saying, look, if I am to lead, then I'm going to pray like Solomon for a heart of wisdom, you know, 1 Kings, the third chapter.

So many good things about the speech. However, you could say, well, we voted, those of us who voted for his party, Amina, never in a million years voted for him thinking that he'd be part of a unity government with these other groups. So it's betrayal. So that's why I look at this ethically and wonder, is this a sign of a political leader who says we have to put our differences aside for the good of the country? We're all Israelis, religious Jews, secular Jews, Arabs, Muslims, the whole group. Here we are.

Let's figure out a way to work together. Or, or is this a matter of political compromise? Is this a matter of someone who is offered a pot of gold, you get to serve as prime minister, even though you have a tiny number of votes overall, right? Less than one, well under one tenth of the total.

And you get to be a kingmaker, how's that work? So I don't know what to make of it. I'm hopeful that it could be for good and even point a way forward for the nation. Now on the flip side, the ultra-orthodox, very upset over this because they're excluded and they know that those that are elected now, or those that have formed this government will be much less sympathetic to their requests and desires.

On the other hand, their numbers, the ultra-orthodox, keep growing because of a high birth rate, much higher than the population of Israel as a whole. So how's that gonna work out over a number of years? Which way are things gonna go?

In my mind, Israel is gonna go further and further to the right over the years, primarily because of ultra-orthodox birth rates and presence. But we shall see. We shall see.

So I, I am not discouraged over this like, oh no, it's the worst thing. It could have hope, but I really don't know yet what to make of it. So I want to go to a write-up about this from Joel Rosenberg on his allisrael.com website. So he's got a bunch of provocative questions in the headline to his article. Is Netanyahu really finished? Is someone with only seven seats really going to become prime minister? Did a Muslim Brotherhood party really agree to join Israel's government?

If this new government rises to power, is that good or bad? So reporting from United Arab Emirates, he said it was strange, I'll admit, to be in an Arab country while the biggest day in Israeli politics in a generation unfolded back home. Indeed, yesterday was the Super Bowl of Israeli politics.

The Knesset voted to elect a new president, Isaac Bougie Herzog, for a seven-year term. Meanwhile, the leaders of the opposition informed the current president, Reuven Rivlin, so president is more of a figurehead role, that they have formed a new government after four rounds of elections in two years, no state budget, and ongoing political chaos and confusion. Yet, your ear leaped enough to the Bennett only called Rivlin minutes before their mandate expired at midnight, so they're scrambling. No, you said it, yeah, I get that. No, can you just imagine what's going on, the wrangling? It's like, I got what you need.

You can't move forward without me. And who makes the final decisions? And so that's obviously what was going on. So it was only after a day of intense, some might say brutal negotiations between eight opposition parties who are very little in common with each other, except that they want to remove Netanyahu from power. All the while Netanyahu and his allies were doing everything they possibly could to stop or at least slow down their opponents from driving them out of power.

Whew. You thought the fireworks over Trump and Biden over the past year were intense. That's nothing compared to Israeli politics, which are truly a blood sport. What does all of it mean? I'm getting questions from evangelicals all over the world. Let me try to answer some of them as best as I can. First question, Joe Rosenberg tackles, is Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu really finished?

Answer, no, not yet. Let's be honest, he's in grave danger. But remember, Netanyahu was a shrewd political cat. You don't become the longest serving prime minister in the modern history of Israel without knowing how to engage in full metal jacket, political combat, or without having a few tricks up your sleeve.

At this point, I would not count Bibi out. Yes, many Israelis hate him, but he's still the most popular politician in Israel. His part of Likud is still the biggest with 30 seats, almost double out of his main rival, Yair Lapid, who's the Ash-Atid party of 17 seats. Keep in mind that the coalition that Lapid and Bennett have formed is a hodgepodge of right wing centrist and left wing parties. They have almost nothing in common with each other, as well as an Arab party that has never participated in Israeli government before. These are not people who are used to working with each other. Some of them deeply despise each other's ideologies.

So this whole thing could blow apart at any moment. That's what Netanyahu and his allies will work towards, and it very well could happen. So they're going to keep trying to undermine, get people within these different parties to back out of their support, to undermine the whole thing. Question, is someone with only seven seats in the Knesset, Naftali Bennett, really going to become the prime minister of Israel?

Answer, maybe. Naftali Bennett and his Yamina party only have seven seats, but actually five of his colleagues want to join this government. One says he will vote against it. Ah, never in Israel history has the leader of a party with so few seats ever become premier. The reason it could happen is that Lapid, with 17 seats, knows he cannot form a government without Bennett's help. Lapid, a centrist, also knows that Israel has become a center right country politically. Thus, he could not depend only on centrist and left wing parties to oust Netanyahu and bring about change. He urgently needed right wing parties. That's why Bennett became widely known as the kingmaker during the recent campaign, because everyone realized Lapid could never become king without Bennett's help. But now the kingmaker is poised to become the king. To persuade Bennett to abandon Bibi and his right wing allies, Lapid offered Bennett the opportunity to become prime minister for the first two years of their term while Lapid would serve as foreign minister.

Then the two will switch roles after two years. Yeah, only in Israel, right? Bennett would have preferred to form a right wing government with Netanyahu despite his immense and growing frustrations with Netanyahu. But Netanyahu could not persuade enough parties to join him to form an actual government.

So Bennett decided to take Lapid's offer to prevent the country from being forced into a fifth round of elections. Question. Did a Muslim Brotherhood party, Muslim Brotherhood responsible for a lot of Islamic radicalism around the world, did a Muslim Brotherhood party really just agree to join an Israeli government? Answer.

Yes. Ra'am is an Islamist party of Arab citizens of Israel led by Mansour Abbas. It only has four seats in the Knesset. But yes, it is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, as all Israel news has reported, Abbas is charting a very different path for his party. He has denounced Arab violence against Jews and Jewish violence against Arabs. He is urging Israeli Arabs to become active in Israeli politics in order to get more funding for Arab cities and education, more police protection to fight crime in Arab cities and so on. Not all Israeli Arabs agree with the direction Abbas is going. Indeed, most of his fellow Arab Knesset members are actively opposed to what he's doing. But on Wednesday night, just minutes before the deadline, he signed on the dotted line and agreed to help form the next Israeli government to remove Netanyahu from power and make the right wing, Naftali Bennett, the prime minister.

Can this experiment work? Abbas may be fully committed to this move, but are the other three members of his party? Will they hold up under intense media and public pressure from Arabs who believe they should remain in opposition to every Zionist government and those who cannot stand Bennett saying he's more right wing than Bibi? We shall see.

Joe Rosenberg gets into more. You can read it on allisrael.com. He's been sending me his latest updates to make sure I am following the latest news in his perspective. Those are the three words to take hold of. Got them? We shall see.

But for me, my perspective, it could actually be positive and necessary, but we shall see. Be right back. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get into the line of fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome, welcome to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

This is Michael Brown. That's the voice of my good friend, Marty Goetz. Yeah, there's some wonderful anointed messianic Jewish worship leaders, psalmist, songwriters. Love ministering together with them over the years when we have the opportunities.

Hey, we have something very rare on a Thursday, which is open phone lines. So if you want to call with any Jewish related question of any kind, 866-348-7884. Okay, switching from the Israeli elections and the government and where things are going. A couple years back, I get a call on the show one day. A woman asked me, is it true that under the Noah Hyde laws, the seven laws of Noah, that Jews are going to start beheading Christians around the world? It was one of the craziest things I've heard in my life, and I've heard a lot of crazy things. And I reacted with incredulity and I said, there's more chance of Santa Claus coming down your chimney and Christmas than that happening. Well, next thing, I'm getting people contacting us. They're very offended.

Dr. Brown, how could you dare say that? And look at this YouTube channel, it's highly respected and it's got hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they're saying the same thing and teaching the same thing. I'm thinking, where is this coming from?

What in the seven worlds is this? And the concept of the seven laws of Noah is simply that traditional Judaism believes that God gave the Torah with 613 commandments, which are then explicated through Jewish tradition. God gave that to the Jewish people, so Jews are required to keep all the commandments of the Torah. But the Gentile world is not. Gentile world is not required to keep the dietary laws. The Gentile world is not required to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. The Gentile world is not required to keep all the purity laws. Rather, the Gentile world is required to keep the so-called seven laws of Noah, which rabbinic tradition deduces from a command to Adam in Genesis 2 and God's commands to Noah in Genesis 9.

Now, some of it's clearly there in the text and others is by rabbinic exegesis. And these are commands not to commit idolatry, not to blaspheme, not to steal, not to murder, not to commit sexual sins, specifically adultery and others, to establish courts of justice, and then there's law against eating the limb of a living animal. So these are considered to be seven basic laws, and if a Gentile keeps them, they're considered righteous.

So that that's basically it. In recent decades, there's been more of a movement to spread this teaching to the Gentile world and for Judaism to say to the rest of the world, hey, you don't have to keep all the commandments of the Torah, but Gentiles keep these seven. And then you have people who were former Christians who decided, based on their own study, that Christianity was an idolatrous religion, that it taught a false view of God and exalted Jesus into God's state, and they should no longer be Christians. They didn't want to convert to Judaism, so they became what are called Noahides. It's tiny.

Overall numbers, tiny. The people who identify as Noahides. So they actively say we keep the seven laws of Noah, and we learn a lot from Jewish tradition, but we haven't converted to Judaism. We're not responsible to keep all the 613 commandments. And one Jewish movement in particular has sought to spread the Noahide laws around the world, and then you have Muslim leaders, Christian leaders, Jewish leaders saying, hey, we all agree on these seven principles, so why not altogether say that we see things as an expression of our faiths as well as fundamentals of our faiths as well, so let's agree with these together.

So U.S. presidents have said, yes, we affirm these. The Vatican said, yes, we affirm this. And you say, where does the idolatry thing come in? Well, there's been a debate in Jewish history as to whether Christianity should be considered idolatrous or not, because after all, it says God is Trinity and Jesus is God. And among modern Jews today, the majority would say, no, no, Christianity is not idolatry for a Jew.

For someone like me, they'd say it is, but for a Gentile, it's acceptable. And then there are others, especially some traditional Jews, that would still say it's idolatry. So this is the logic of the thing, okay, of this Noahide law hysteria. Here's the logic, and I say logic with quotes, that around the world, people are signing on saying, yeah, we affirm this, we agree with this, thinking that Christianity is acceptable and is not idolatrous. But at a certain point, the Jews are going to say, nope, actually, it is idolatrous, and you sign on the line to support these, so you're going to be beheaded, obviously, beyond preposterous, beyond ridiculous, beyond impossible scenario, unless you want to get to the time of the Antichrist, who's beheading people, but he's going to claim to be God himself. So the several laws of Noah are obviously not going to be the issue. In the Islamic world, radical Muslims are already beheading Christians and have done so for centuries.

So that's already happening, okay? And it's not coming from Jews, obviously. So as I've dialogued with people that hold to this, trying to figure out where's the logic, how could this ever happen, it's been totally convoluted. When I went to the websites and read in my Christian anti-Semitism book to try to see where are they coming from, it was literally crazy stuff to me, so outlandish, so out there. You say, no, no, I've seen videos where Orthodox rabbis say that the penalty for breaking several laws of Noah, the penalty for committing idolatry, is death by decapitation.

Yeah, number one, this is theoretical. In other words, nowhere in the world have Jews ever enforced this or tried to enforce this. And in modern Israel today, there's not a thought, or in the religious community, we should start beheading Christians. No, there's no more thought of that than I said the other day, talking to someone, then Martians are going to come to earth and start beheading mice, okay? It's just non-realities.

You say, no, but it says it long. It's all theoretical about what will happen in the Messianic age. So in Jewish tradition, when the Messiah rules the world and brings peace to the earth, that the entire Jewish world will keep all the commandments. Well, what would happen to a Jew who said, no, I'm going to violate the Sabbath? He'd be put to death, like under the Torah. Well, what would happen to a Gentile who said, well, I'm going to go worship an idol?

Be put to death. That's the theoretical part of it. It's nothing to do with the here and now. It has nothing to do with any more than the Jewish community is putting Jews to death now for violating the Sabbath, okay?

It is completely mythical. So one of the websites that I went after and just referenced is spreading crazy information. The owner of that site, the founder of that site, contacted us and wanted to debate me on the issues. Now, his own background is interesting.

He's a former Jehovah's Witness who's now a Hindu. But, you know, he said he's done all these interviews and debated rabbis and whatever and read thousands of articles and wanted to challenge what I wrote. So I thought, okay, we'll have him on the air. So we normally do everything live. But in this case, we had to pre-record because of his work schedule. So we're happy to do it. He found a time that worked.

We're able to do it. And to my shock, once we got into the interview, he was saying, no, no, it's going to be Gentiles decapitating one another. Gentiles?

How is it going to happen? Well, the rabbis are going to influence them to do it. When I asked him for a quote or an actual source, of course, he had no such thing. When I said, I'm not concerned with what some Noahide conference of Gentile former Christians are saying.

I'm concerned with what the rabbis are saying. He said it's not even the issue of the battle. So remember, we got through one segment. Remember, I'm trying to record this for radio.

It's really bad radio when someone's trying to talk over you. So I was trying to get information out, couldn't get information out from him and said, okay, so hang on, just stop, stop. We'll take a break.

Come back. And I want you to give him information because you know what I wrote in the book. You're challenging me when I wrote in the book. And what I wrote in the book is this myth that Jews are going to start beheading Christians over the Noahide laws, which, as I said, more likely hit a Santa Claus coming down through your chimney or Martians coming there to behead mice. It's that absurd, that preposterous. And it's an anti-Semitic lie.

It's another libel against the Jewish people. A couple people were upset because when I couldn't get my guest to come forward with information, I just said, all right, just stop. We're done here.

Dr. Brown, you took this person. It's my problem. What? Pride?

What pride? I'm trying to be helpful to my listeners and viewers. So we only got into a second segment, ended it there. My team reviewed it and said, hey, let's go ahead and post this. So it's on the YouTube channel. You can see it at Ask Dr. Brown, Ask D.O.

Brown on YouTube. But watch what happens when we come back from the break on that, I don't mean now, I mean on that actual show. It's confronting Noahide law hysteria. As you watch as I'm trying to do a show that's not just going to be to watch, but to listen to the battle that I had in terms of trying to get information from this gentleman and not getting him to interrupt, talk over, and then just to, hey, I wrote certain things refuting a myth.

Now you're backing away and changing the story. So this is some of what we're dealing with, friends. This is some of the madness that's out there. And here's what you have to understand. And if you have my book, Christian Anti-Semitism, you know it. I have quote after quote after quote after quote from professing Christians questioning whether I'm really a follower of Jesus because I've exposed Noahide law hysteria, claiming that I'm secretly working for the rabbinic community and that I'm part of trying to Judaize the church. I mean, crazy accusations. But this is what happens when people drink anti-Semitic Kool-Aid. This is what happens when they buy into lies about the Jewish people.

I actually reached out to a Jewish leader who is actively working worldwide, an Orthodox Jew, to promote Noahide laws as a way to unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims around the common morality. He's actually written in a major book on the subject rule, one of the chapters he wrote. I reached out to him and said, do you have any idea where this stuff is coming from? And some of the hysteria and these claims, he said, no, I never heard of it.

That's crazy. Then an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who is part of the very movement that helps spread the seven laws of Noah to the Gentile world. So ultra-Orthodox rabbi, part of that group and movement, he contacts me and says, I'm hearing all this crazy stuff about seven laws of Noah. Do you know where people are getting this from? So the people within it, it's like, where's this coming from?

We've never heard of such a thing. I saw one comment, I don't normally get to read the comments on YouTube or to our videos, but I decided to look at some of these. Someone said, well, neither of you are well read on it. Well, tell me what I'm missing. Tell me what I'm missing, please. I've said this. I've got relevant literature. I've dug in. Please tell me what I'm missing.

It's not our pride. It's a matter of trying to get truth out to people. And if I have someone propagating dangerous error and I can't get them to give a single clear quote to back their claims, hey, I'm not going to take your air time with it. All right, soon as we come back, I go straight to the phones. It's the line of fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Get into the line of fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again, is Dr. Michael Brown. We are scheduled to go to Israel again next year, God willing. In March, we were scheduled to go last May, would have been May of 2020. And no, I'm sorry, late February, early March, we were scheduled to go. And then things got pushed back because of COVID.

We had about 100 people signed up for the trip. Things got pushed back because of COVID. Then it got pushed back again.

So we had to schedule three different times. And then we decided, you know, rather than pushing for fall of this year, so much uncertainty, that few months back, we decided to just push it to March of next year. So we'll be announcing that more as we see our way more clearly with doors open for travel in Israel, and what vaccine requirements are or are not going to be a vaccination. So we'll sort that out. We'll be announcing it. And I referenced my book, Christian Antisemitism.

It just came out in February. So if you don't have it, it's really eye-opening in terms of what's happening today in the church and in the world. A real eye-opener. Then we dig into the verses that are misinterpreted scripturally. We dig into the importance of understanding God's role and purpose for Israel, the errors of replacement theology, and the significance of Jesus coming back to Jerusalem.

Why Jerusalem if God is finished with Israel as a nation? All right. 866-34-TRUTH. We go to the phone starting with George in Jacksonville, Florida. Welcome to the line of fire. Hey, Dr. Brown. How are you doing today? Doing good. Are you talking straight into the phone, sir? Yes. Oh, yes. Is that better? That's much better, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I held the phone away, just a little bit away from my mouth, and so that was the problem. Anyway, Dr. Brown, I want to tell you I really appreciate your ministry, and over the past few months your broadcast has become like a daily staple for me. So when you're not on the air, I really kind of get a little bummed out about it, but you know, I just wanted to tell you I appreciate you very much.

Thank you. My question for you is, Dr. Brown, is on John chapter 2, you know that you're very familiar with it, Jesus changes water into wine, and the question I've got for you really has to do with kind of like Jewish culture, and specifically how men address women, because in verse four where his mother says, back in verse three, his mom tells him, Mary tells him, says, hey, they don't have any more wine, and I'm reading from the New International Version, and he says, woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, my hour has not yet come. I guess, can you help me understand how to put the tone of what he said in its proper context? Yeah, it's actually an unusual saying. In other words, it's not a saying that if you just understood the Jewish background, it makes sense, falls into place. There are many things like that.

When you understand the ancient, your Eastern background, or the Greco-Roman background, or the Jewish background, then ah, light goes on, makes perfect sense, that works. This is one of those that's still a little bit unusual. To my knowledge, this would not have been the typical way for a Jewish man to address his mother, and there is some, there is, so it seems a little jarring when we read it. To my knowledge, it was meant to be a little jarring, not disrespectful, but more of you are outside of your role. You don't understand who I am or what I'm going to do. There's a bit of a push back with it, and then her understanding of, okay, you just do whatever he says.

You do whatever he says. Now, by the way, I'm gonna go on a total tangent here. I had friends who were missionaries in Guatemala decades ago, and Guatemala has an increasing evangelical Christian population, but has been a very strong Catholic nation for many years, and they were trying to get the Catholics to focus on the words of Jesus, and they knew that these Catholics really revered Mary and honored Mary. So they had a gospel track that quoted Mary saying, whatever he says, do it, and then the inside of the track, that was the cover, the inside of the track was all the words of Jesus, but that was their way to, so that's just a total tangent. So let's say I was trying to research this, right, and you know, for Jewish background. So the two main places that I would immediately go in my personal library, I would go to David Stern's Jewish New Testament commentary, right? So David Stern's Jewish New Testament commentary, I go to John, the second chapter, and here's his comment.

Mother, why should that concern me or you? Literally, what to you and what to me and to you, woman? This translates into Greek, a Hebrew idiom found a number of times in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and we're thereby reminded of the Hebraic roots necessary to proper understanding of the New Testament. The meaning of this idiom is flexible. Renderings include what we have in common, why you involve me, you must not tell me what to do, why turn to me, your concern is not mine. The Greek gune means woman, but saying gune to a woman in Greek is not nearly as cold and addresses woman in English, that's why I've rendered it mother. Nevertheless, Yeshua's answer in total, no matter how translated, puts distance between him and his mother Miriam.

Why does he do this? As he disobeyed the commandment to honor his father and mother as opponents of the gospel. Suppose the answer comes with the following remark, my time, literally my hour, hasn't come yet. So the point is that yes, there is Jewish background, but it still is a little jarring and reading it in English is still going to give you the right outcome.

My time has not yet come, there's something different here. So as Yeshua says, Yohanan's gospel often has Yeshua speaking about his time and each occasion as a reason. Here are the reasons that Yeshua's mother had been informed even before he was born that he was meant for greatness, she had heard others prophesy about him, she had observed his development, although not always with understanding, and she had known that future generations would bless her. Yeshua's comment is meant to aid her in the transition from seeing him as her child to seeing him as her Lord, to keep her from undue pride, to indicate that he is Lord sovereignly determines when he'll intervene human affairs, etc. So as I said, there is that putting a distance and it's helping her to recognize who her son is and even that reminder of his destiny, even his destiny to die. And again, so it's an interesting saying for sure.

The other place I would go, by the way, is if just in terms of one simple volume, I would go to Craig Keener and his Bible background commentary. And he says here, woman was a respectful address like ma'am but hardly customary for one's mother, as I had said. Jesus' statement here establishes polite distance, though what have I to do with you is usually a harsh, not a polite expression in biblical language, because Jesus' hour in John refers especially to the cross here.

Jesus is saying, once I begin doing miracles, I begin the road to the cross. So again, kind of preparing her for what's coming. So, yep. And he ultimately honored her by basically doing what she wanted, you know, if you want to... Right, right, right.

He does honor her ultimately, but it is one of these things to just say, okay, we're now starting this setting where it's a different relationship than it's been up until now. Because remember, he hasn't performed miracles yet, just beginning his ministry. Hey, George, thank you for your question. By the way, on the days when we're not live on the radio, Saturday, Sunday, just pull up some old videos. We've got so many archives, this way you won't have to go through withdrawal over the weekend. God bless, George, I appreciate it.

And let's go to Laura in Nashville, Tennessee. Welcome to the line of fire. Hey, thank you.

You're welcome. Okay, so I'm a Gentile Christian who's in a relationship with an Orthodox Messianic Jew, and we are talking about marriage, and he's asked me to consider taking on the laws of Moses. At a minimum, I would have to practice Shabbat, live kosher, celebrate the holidays, and... Sorry, I'm getting another call. All right, you go ahead and deal, get rid of that call, just don't take it, because we've got limited time. Go ahead, yeah.

Okay, very good. So I would have to practice Shabbat, live kosher, celebrate the holidays, and practice a couple of other purity laws. What is your advice for me as I begin to look into Orthodox Judaism and how that would look like as a believer in Jesus? Unless you have a very specific call from God to do it, and you do not do it out of obligation but out of calling, it's going to be a dangerous trap and error that will rob you of your first love for Jesus, that will put you in a situation where Torah observance is more important than worship and adoration of the Son of God, and where you will then not stop there, there'll be yet another tradition, and another tradition, and another tradition, as if being a Gentile Christian was somehow second-class.

So it has to be a specific calling. If the gentleman you're in relationship with says, no, it is an obligation by God that every Jew keeps all these even messianic Jews, and that Gentile Christians should as well, then I would say there's a serious theological error. If it's a matter of calling, we are called to minister to the Orthodox community, and therefore to live in an authentic way among them, and that you would undergo some type of conversion to messianic Judaism by calling like a Ruth, fine. Otherwise, Paul's very explicit. Read through 1 Corinthians chapter 7, beginning about 16, 15, 16 verses in, where Paul says, if you're saved, call, circumcised, don't become uncircumcised. If you saved uncircumcised, don't become circumcised. I'd have a major, major caution, and I would ask him, can I preach Jesus, freely love Jesus, freely worship him as Jesus, or would I have to change the Lord? If you have to change all that, I'd be very careful. Another program powered by the Truth Network.