Whoopi Goldberg and the Holocaust

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Was the view right to suspend Whoopi Goldberg over her Holocaust comments? It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the line of fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for joining us on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

It's so great to be with you today. This is Michael Brown. The number to call with any Jewish related question of any kind 866-34-TRUTH, 866-348-7884.

That is the number to call. So Jewish related? Well, it's about the Jewish people. It's about Israel today.

If it's about the Hebrew Bible or Hebrew language or Jewish religion or messianic prophecy or Jewish background to the New Testament, all those qualify as Jewish related. Again, 866-34-TRUTH. For those listening by radio on our great stations, we had an interesting situation the last two days before this where our radio studio in Winston-Salem, it's about an hour and a quarter from where we are, had to be evacuated because of a potential chemical problem, potential explosion problem. Anyway, folks were able to get back in and engineer the show today. So glad to be back with you live. To prove it's live, it is February 3rd. Right now, it's 3.04 PM and 23 seconds.

Of course, not 23 anymore. All right. Whoopi Goldberg's comments. It's interesting. Whoopi is a black woman, but she does claim some Jewish blood in her family lineage and has often identified as Jewish. Her original name, Karen Johnson, and then she took on the name Whoopi Goldberg, but it's one thing to take the name Whoopi. It'd be an unusual name to give your child. So that was a chosen name for whatever reason.

I don't know the history, but Goldberg, very evident Jewish name. So she obviously does not have a Jewish mother and father, but in some of her statements over the years, she has identified as Jewish although not an observant Jewish person. So she would understand in that context that you can be a Jew and be white or be black or be Asian, right? In any case, she made these unfortunate comments the other day on The View. And of course there's been a massive firestorm over it.

So here's what she had to say. The Holocaust isn't about race. No, no, it's not about race.

It's about man's inhumanity to man. But these are two white groups of people. But you're missing the point.

You're missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let's talk about it for what it is. It's how people treat each other. All right, let's do the same with slavery. Blacks have enslaved whites, whites haven't saved enslaved blacks, blacks haven't saved enslaved blacks, whites have enslaved whites. So the general phenomenon of slavery transcends race. So let's just talk about man's inhumanity to man. Well, no, no, because in America, it was definitely racial.

In other words, the Africans, the blacks were looked at as inferior people. All right. It was. You can't just say it's man's inhumanity against man.

You miss the biggest issue. This was not random inhumanity against man. And it just happened to be people who were Jews. No, this was a systematic attempt to exterminate all Jews in Europe. And ultimately the goal would have been all Jews in the world, if possible. And we'll see in a moment what Hitler's own views were about Jews and race. Okay. Further comment from Whoopi. The American experience tends to be based on skin.

Yes. And so that is what race means to me. When you talk about being a racist, I was saying, you can't call this racism. This was evil. This wasn't, this wasn't based on the skin. You couldn't tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out.

You didn't have to delve deeply. You had to delve deeply to hide your Jewishness because Jewish identity was well known and the Jewish community was well known. And it was not a secret among many German Jews. In fact, many German Jews, it's been said over the years were more German than they were Jewish. And yet they were still recognized as Jews.

You could even be in a church baptized, but if you were a Jew, you would go into the concentration camps. Yeah. And there were identity papers and all of this, and it was known. So in any case there's an outcry over this and Whoopi Goldberg issues this apology.

She tweets it out, but then she reads it as well on The View. I said that the Holocaust wasn't about race and it was instead about man's inhumanity to man, but it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race. Now words matter and mine are no exception. I regret my comments as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people as they know and y'all know because I've always done that.

All right. So the comments were severe, were ugly, were ill-informed. She did give an apology clearly. Was it right for The View to suspend her? I don't watch The View. I don't know what their overall ethics are. I don't believe that she should be fired upon apologizing and then really educating herself.

They had found someone from the ADL, I believe, Anti-Defamation League, to talk about these issues. So true repentance for something done wrong, either in ignorance or willful, is you go in the other direction. You go in the other direction to fix things. You educate yourself better.

You help others learn and get educated. It's just a good thing. It's a positive thing. In today's cancel culture, you do something far less than that. You, in some playful way with your friends, everybody's getting made up and putting on these silly outfits and you put on blackface and you don't realize it's offensive to people. And then 15 years later, you get fired from a job over. That's outrageous. If it came out 15 years ago, Whoopi Goldberg made these comments.

No one knew it. Now it comes out today and she's not had a history of that and she publicly repudiates the comments. You don't get fired over that. But we shall see how this plays out. To suspend her, yeah, that makes sense.

In other words, clap on the wrist and we want everyone to know how much we abhor these comments and then back in good favor. But as far as the race issue, you have to understand that being Jewish is a religious thing, potentially, and or an ethnic thing. And in that sense, a racial thing. So you could be a traditional Jew practicing Judaism, learned it from your ancestors going back. All right. You could be a gentile who converts to Judaism and now you become part of the Jewish people and your kids are considered Jewish or the kids that you have after are considered Jewish. Or you could be someone born into a Jewish family, but no longer practicing Judaism, having any connection to Judaism, being an out and out atheist and you're still a Jew.

All right. So I want to read this to you. This goes back to 1919, Adolf Hitler, and he certainly built on this mentality in the years that followed. So this is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And September 16th, 1919, Hitler issues his first written comment on the so-called Jewish question. In the statement, he defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community, characterized the effect of a Jewish presence as a, quote, race tuberculosis of the peoples, and identified the initial goal of a German government to be discriminatory legislation against Jews. The, quote, ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews all together. Hitler's years in Vienna, 1908, 1913, and his military service were important stages for his development of a comprehensive racist ideology. There's a discussion on a British TV show.

There's an author who's written about this himself, a Jewish atheist, and he weighs in on the question. Listen to what he has to say. The problem with it is there's so many issues. I'm a fan of Whoopi Goldberg.

He's always been a fan of her. But there are so many issues, what he's saying. It does reveal an awful lot about the confusions that people have around antisemitism that are explored in my book. And one of the principal things going on here is the resistance to the idea that antisemitism is racism.

And I think, what does Whoopi Goldberg think it is? Well, I think what a lot of people think it is is religious intolerance. And the problem with that is I'm an atheist, and the Gestapo would have shot me tomorrow. My great uncle Arno, who died in the Warsaw ghetto, was not an observant Jew. And indeed, it's not just the Holocaust. Now neo-Nazis marching with torches saying the Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville, they would not ask a Jew whether he kept kosher before they set light to their house.

They're not interested in faith. And the Nazis were not interested in faith. They were interested in racial purity. That's what the laws, the Nuremberg Laws were. They were racial purity laws. But that comment suggests that there are people who think racism is only about the color of your skin.

Yeah, no, that's true. And there's a specific thing that I think is going on here, which is the whiteness of Jews is a very complex thing. I used this phrase in the book.

It's a bit early for this, but anyway, called Schrodinger's White. So what I mean by that is Jews are seen as white or non-white, depending on the politics of the observer, right? So far right groups, and for years and centuries, have seen Jews as not part of the white races, absolutely part of Hitler's project, to say Jews are not part of the area of white races. But meanwhile, on the other side, on the far left, the association of Jews, which is a racist thing with power and privilege, makes them kind of super white. And what that ends up with, it's similar, to be honest, in the Black Lives Matter thing with saying all lives matter, because it takes away from the specifics of the racism to something very bland and general, like man to humanity to man. Okay, but what's going on here is actually a very particular type of genocide. She talked on Stephen Colbert's show about two sides fighting. This was not two sides fighting. This was an ethnic group being marked out to be destroyed by a military industrial machine. So the thing that is extra disturbing about the whoopee comments is that she dug her heels in further on Colbert and expressed and articulated the real error, the real problem in her understanding.

Now, I take her apology for what it is, and hopefully, with true repentance, with wanting to make things right, you go out of your way to address things in a positive, constructive, and educational way. That was David Baddiel, Jewish comedian. When he mentioned his book, I had not seen his writings relative to the Jewish people. Perhaps it's his book. Jews don't count, but I'm not sure.

But his comments are right on point. And of course, there are Middle Eastern Jews, which would be the most original Jews, right? There are African Jews. There are Asian Jews. There are white Jews, right?

So we come in many shapes, forms. In its sense, it is not just one race, meaning skin color, okay? But ethnicity and skin color are not always synonymous. And if you target a group based on its ethnicity, that is racism.

This was an attempt to exterminate the Jewish race. Stop there. Full stop.

That is the reality, and that is the fact, and that is the truth. Okay. We will be right back. 866-342. Phones are open. We've got some open lines. Any Jewish-related question, great day to call in. We'll be right back. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown.

Get on the Line of Fire by calling 866-342. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Oh, yeah.

Great transition again, team. Scale it to our Jewish music, and that was in Hebrew. Praise the Lord, all nations, all peoples. So 866-348-7884 for your Jewish-related questions.

Let's go over to Michael in Greensboro, North Carolina. Welcome to the Line of Fire. Yes, I'd just like to say I'm a white person who's disgusted by any racism. I'm disgusted by racism against Jewish people, black people, American Indians, Asians, any group, and anyone in the United States who thinks racism can only be against black people, that is not factual. Yeah, of course, and the thing is that those who have been discriminated against, mistreated, those who have been the objects of racism should be very sensitive to that as well. Sometimes we become blind because we're so conscious of our own suffering, Jewish suffering through the centuries.

We're so conscious of that that we don't recognize, maybe we get a little ascendancy. Okay, we're not as sensitive to racism in other places. But what's interesting is that liberal Judaism in America has worked hand in hand with black activists for many, many years. Martin Luther King famously marched together with actually conservative rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel himself of Orthodox background. So there was for years a much better relationship between Jews and blacks in America. And it was the Jewish people understanding, hey, we've been under, we've been down, we've been oppressed, discriminated against simply based on our race or our religion. And we're sensitive to the plight of African Americans. There should be greater unity.

I'll say this one thing, Michael. Many years ago in New York City, oh, about 40 years ago, I confronted some black Hebrew Israelites with their message of hate on the streets of the city. Now, I failed to calculate along with the guy next to me, my friend next to me, another Jewish believer, that we were the only whites in the crowd, that the message that was coming, branding us as devils and all of this, the white man is the manifestation of Satan, that that would have appealed to some of the people there. And when I spoke, as I spoke, I was the outsider. I don't mean all blacks are anti-white.

Of course not. I'm just saying that crowd was sympathetic to their message of hate. So I said to them, you preach your message of hate.

I was yelling it out because they had the mics. I said, you preach your message of hate. Jesus preached a message of love. I said, Jews and blacks, we're going to find ourselves in the bottom of the bow. We're going to need each other. And that remains my harsh, that we need each other and let us walk in grace and honor towards one another.

Hey, thank you for making that categorical statement. 866-348-7884. I posted on Twitter and Facebook earlier today asking people to post the most difficult questions and objections to the faith that they get. And I would get to as many as possible on tomorrow's broadcast rather than taking calls. We'd get to as many as possible. I'm going to get to some of them now and then we'll make a note and let them know, hey, we answered this on the Thursday show rather than the Friday show.

So I'm going over to Twitter and let's just see here. Someone Ahil CH. Objection from Rabbi Tovias Singer. Jesus was against the law when he said, what goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them. No, it wasn't against the law at all. Did his disciples then go out and kill a pig and eat it? Did did Peter change his lifestyle so that he immediately began eating foods that at that time were prohibited by the law?

No. In fact, in Acts 10, he'd never eaten anything unclean his entire life. It's really 10 chapters into the Book of Acts. Jesus is simply explaining a spiritual principle, which is true. Yeshua is explaining that the food that goes in your mouth does not spiritually defile you.

For example, if you were a blind Jewish person, religious Jew, and someone told you they were serving you certain meat, food that was kosher and you ate it and maybe you had a bad cold you couldn't taste and you found out afterwards that they accidentally reached in the refrigerator and got you the wrong meat. The food itself does not defile you. That was the point Yeshua was making. It's what comes out of our heart that defiles us. He was giving us a deep spiritual truth. Now, you could argue based on him inaugurating the new and better covenant whether things have changed. That is an argument and discussion to have. There are Jewish traditions that say in the world to come that all foods will be clean.

So, there is no objection, no issue there. And by the way, if you'll check on our YouTube channel, Ask Dr. Brown, or on the website AskDrBrown.org, just type in singer. You'll find that we have many videos specifically demolishing the errors and the false information that he so widely puts out online. I will go back to the phones, but then we're going to answer some more of these Old Testament Hebrew-related questions. Beth in Queens, thanks for calling the line of fire. Thank you, Dr. Brown.

You're welcome. My question is about Leviticus 23, 10. It says, the Jewish people, when they came into the land that I will give you and reap its harvest, you shall bring a sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest. So, now obviously the Jewish people and specifically Jewish believers don't have to do this, but would the equivalent of this be giving the first paycheck of the year to your church or something like that?

Yes, theoretically. In other words, there were annual things that happened. So, it was coming into the land and then each year at certain times of the year you would take the first fruits and offer them up to the Lord, but the principle is giving the first and giving the best. So, with Cain and Abel, what was it that Abel did that was better than what Cain did? You could say, well, Abel offered an animal sacrifice and Cain just offered fruit of the ground, but I don't believe that was the issue there. Rather, it just says Cain brought from the fruit of the ground, Abel brought from the firstlings.

He brought the best. If you look in Proverbs chapter 3 verses 9 and 10, it urges us to honor the Lord from our first fruits. So, tithing is a way of doing that. In other words, whatever you're convicted to give or feel led to give, so when you get your income, the first check that you write is back to the Lord's work or to your local congregation. It would be the same concept. Or if you said, hey, we do something over and above, the first paycheck we get, the new year we give all of it to the Lord, and then the first portion, the rest of the year. Those would be spiritual equivalents, not by the requirements of the law, but by the principle that we have just like Matthew 6.33, seek first the kingdom of God and righteousness, and all these things will be added.

So, it's a good principle to live by, God first and then everything else following. All right? Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much. You bet. You bet.

86634, truth. Let me go back over to some of these Twitter questions. Let's see. And I'm trying to just do one per person.

All right. Another question was asked, what about the Nephilim in Genesis 6? And apparently that's a question that causes this person to stumble or others that they know.

There is nothing to stumble over. In other words, Genesis 6 gives us an ancient account which can be read in one of two different ways. It could be read that the sons of God represent the godly line of Seth, and the daughters of men represent the ungodly line of Cain, and that they intermarried, which is sinful.

It would be like the Israelites marrying pagans, or a born-again spiritual believer marrying a Satanist. That it was a wrong mixture. It was a defiling of the godly and bringing compromise, and therefore that was one of the things that led to the destruction of the world.

Things were so evil and corrupt and God had to destroy. That's one possible way to read it. The other way to read it, which is the way I read it, is that the sons of God were angelic beings that fell and took on human form, and they intermarried with human women and produced children, and this was absolutely abominable, this mixing of the species, or you could say the heavenly with the earthly. This mixing was terribly ugly and wrong, and that's one of the reasons that God wiped out the human race and restarted it with Noah and his family.

You say, that's like crazy. Well, first thing is, you could just say if someone's struggling with it, there is debate as to the actual interpretation. It could be the other way. No, you don't want someone to lose their whole faith in God over that. On the other hand, you could say who's to say that these kinds of things don't happen? Who's to say that there isn't some type of intersection that can happen between the spiritual and natural?

We simply don't know, but it's something to fight over or divide over. Or you could just say, well, I'm not sure about it and go on. That's fine. That's not the issue.

Whatever the Bible records is accurate, but sometimes we don't understand all of the details of what is being recorded. Hey, quick question for you, then I'm going to get to more of your calls and tweets and Facebook questions. But quick question, have you visited vitaminmission.com or did you go and forget to go back?

All right. I really encourage you to check it out. These are the health supplements of Dr. Mark Stengler, who is also my personal doctor. And I take a number of these, the multivitamins and immune vitamins and other things like this.

So when you go to the website, you'll see a special discount code to use. That's Dr. Stengler's way of being a blessing to you, our listeners and viewers. And then Dr. Stengler turns around and donates back to our ministry with every single purchase.

So let's partner together to extend the work of the gospel to reach more and more Jewish people in Yeshua's name and you get healthier in the process. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Oh yeah, it is thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

Michael Brown, delighted to be with you. Here's this number to call 866-34-TRUTH, 866-34-87-884. I am going to respond to some questions that were posted on Twitter and on Facebook that relate specifically to the Old Testament, that relate specifically to questions that are appropriate for Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. And if you'd like to call in and ask your question, as always, 866-34-TRUTH is the number to call. This one was posted on Twitter and it's a longtime colleague, coworker, friend of mine, Steve Ault, longtime professor at Fire School of Ministry.

You can still take his classes online with us at fireschoolofministry.com, but he also teaches at some other schools now. So it's one of the major, most penetrating questions and there's a similar one that was posted on Facebook as well. The God of the Old Testament commands the killing of men, women and children without mercy, destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and punishes unbelievers with eternal torment. Who would want to serve such an angry, vengeful God? And then looking at a question asked by Jim on Facebook, Israel being told to kill entire nations, why not adopt the youngest of the children and raise them in the ways of the Lord instead of killing them?

The latter is easier to screw with what we teach about God today and unbelievers take this discrepancy as evidence that the Bible is just another book. Okay, let's accept the fact that those are serious questions. I deal with them in my book, Has God Failed You? So I do treat these head on in writing in the book, Has God Failed You? But these are serious issues.

We can't just, well, no big deal. And I appreciate someone like Reverend John Piper, who so affirms the holiness and justice of God and so recognizes the sinfulness of human beings that when he's asked about this, his response is God can kill whoever he wants whenever he wants, whatever he does is right and good. From his perspective, that is a satisfactory answer. But obviously, for the perspective of an unbeliever, a sincere unbeliever, or a Christian struggling with their faith, or someone who's very, very sensitive and caring and compassionate, that would not satisfy. And perhaps Dr. Piper would phrase these things differently in an outreach type of context.

In any case, I want to say a few things first. Let's start with the overall revelation of God in the Bible. He is incredibly patient. He is incredibly long suffering. He tells Abraham that his descendants are going to be captive in a foreign nation, and they're going to be there 400 years, and they're going to suffer. But that's because their promised land, their homeland is not ready yet, because the iniquity of the Amorites has not reached full measure. In other words, the people deserve to be punished and judged and even wiped out, but God won't do it until their sin reaches a certain level. And throughout the Bible, God is praised as merciful and compassionate and the father of the orphan and the husband of the widow and caring about the poor stranger and immigrant throughout the Bible. And then when we come into the New Testament, we get the full picture of who he is when he sends his son to die for all the evil things that we did. Every single one of them, the Son of God took on his shoulders. So here he is, the absolute perfect eternal son coming into our world and not just having to live in our world, but dying a criminal's death openly shamed in horrific suffering to pay for what we did so we would not have to pay for it. That's the same God that ordered the killing of the Canaanites. So I first want to point to Jesus.

This is not a cop-out. No, this is the heart of the message. I first want to point to Yeshua and say that that is the full expression of who God is. I remember wrestling when my dad died suddenly at the age of 63 in 1977 and I had been praying for him. He came to some church services and heard me preach. I gave him a New Testament. Remember, he was reading it and he said to me, so when am I going to feel something?

I thought, okay, good. God's working in him. God's bringing him to faith and then he died suddenly. He never made a clear profession of faith.

Maybe something was going on in his heart that I didn't know about. Maybe God worked in his life right before he died, but I had no certainty of it. You know, years later people said to me, hey, remember the principle that Jesus gave whoever receives me received the one who sent me. So your dad received you as a believer, therefore he received Yeshua through that.

That's bad theology, but you know, it's your dad. And I wrestled with it and I wondered and then I thought, okay, the day I stand before God and look in his face and the day that I hear if my dad is with him or not and if we'll be together forever, I know that my Father, my Heavenly Father will do what's right. I know that the one who's been so incredibly long suffering and compassionate with me and not treating me as my sins deserve that that God will do what's good and what's right and what's just and what's loving and that with all my being, I'll be able to affirm it on that day. And of course, you know where my deep deepest hopes lie.

Okay. That's first thing, the love of God. This is, this is an essential part of his character, incredible long suffering, compassion. Second thing, we are more sinful than we realize. We are more evil than we realize.

We compare ourselves to ourselves and we think, Oh, I'm, I'm pretty good. I wonder if God just took our thought life for the last week or for the last month and put that up publicly. I wonder how we'd feel.

I wonder how we'd look. I wonder if God just counted every lie we've ever told. Everything where we willfully colored the truth and deceived. Every lustful thought or desire, greedy, angry, whatever it is, wherever our greatest weaknesses are.

If, if we just had a record of those and they started to pile up, we'd be devastated. Here. Have you ever looked in your, your, your history online, say with, with Windows PC, hit control H. I don't know what it is with, with Apple.

And it'll just bring up all the websites you've been to recently. And maybe you're, you're, ah, what was that thing I was looking for was like an hour ago. I was there and you find it. You've been like 400 sides.

Like how did it accumulates? God sees all of it. We all deserve destruction. We as a human race deserve destruction. Yet when it came to Sodom and Gomorrah, when it came to others, God waited and waited and waited until the iniquity was so great until the ugliness was so great.

Yeah. Think of the violence of ISIS and that. And when we hear that, that we successfully bombed an ISIS enclave, we, we think that's good news because they're, they're not going to kill so many people and they deserve death. What we all deserve death. That that's a fact. Don't be so self-righteous.

They want basically a good person. We stand in God's presence and we are evaluated by his standards because he created us, right? There's not to explain himself to us.

He created us. We're all guilty in his sight. You say, okay, okay, fine. Even if, if I saw things then and saw how bad they were, I would have said, please God judge them.

That's the right thing to do. That the evil is so ugly and so destructive. But what about children? What about babies?

That's the biggest question. I mean, picture the same to us, the monstrosity of that. There are a couple of different ways to look at this. I actually was reading studies, scientific studies in preparing for the book Has God Failed You that talked about things that can be hereditary on a moral basis. In other words, literally bad seed that just like children of alcoholics have a much higher percentage of being alcoholics.

And it's not only upbringing that there are arguments for genetic morality. Obviously we're all born fallen and sinful and in need of a savior and a redeemer. And obviously Jesus forgives us and changes us when we come to him. But this could have been part of the problem.

There was deep seeded corruption and or demonization. Now the other thing is this, as I understand scripture, and this is the other side of it, this could have been ultimate mercy in that if they would have grown up and lived out an evil life and been destroyed by dying as children, God does not hold them accountable. And therefore, even though they die in this world, they're with the Lord forever. You say, well, what about the question of eternal torment?

I would approach that also in two ways. The first I would say, what if we continue to rebel? In other words, what if upon being judged, we continue to rebel and therefore are continually punished? Others would say a sin against eternal, an eternal deity deserves eternal punishing. Others, however, would say, if you look at scripture carefully, it doesn't talk about eternal torment. It talks about destruction.

It talks about cutting off. It talks about putting to an end and that the fate of the wicked, the fate of the unrepentant, the fate of even the most evil people who ever lived, they will suffer for their sins, but they will ultimately be terminated. They will perish. Whoever does not believe will perish. So some are resurrected to eternal life, others are resurrected to destruction. If someone's whole objection to hearing the gospel is the question of eternal torment, I would present some of what I've said, and I would reiterate that many Christians do believe that the final end of the wicked is destruction, not eternal torment.

And that sometimes allows this person to hear the rest of the message and then to study the scriptures and come to their own conclusion. But let us not belittle the seriousness of these issues. Let's speak the truth in love.

And then when people encounter God and get to know Him for themselves and find the extraordinary love of the Lord in their lives, that resolves most of the questions right then and there. We'll be right back. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hebrew, the one who works peace in the heavens, shalom in the heavens, do it on the earth.

866-34-TRUTH, welcome to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. Before that, you heard the resistance from Skillet. We've become good friends with John Cooper, getting to know the whole band.

In fact, God willing, we'll see them in concert in Charlotte, North Carolina on Sunday night. But that theme, the resistance, ties right in with my newest book. Friends, I want to strongly encourage you to get a copy.

It comes out March 1st, but you can pre-order it on our website. It is called The Silencing of the Lambs, The Ominous Rise of Cancel Culture and How We Overcome It. Friends, your eyes will be opened as much as you follow the news and know what's happening in the world. Your eyes will be opened as you read what's happening on college campuses in America.

If you read what Big Tech is doing, if you just look at the larger attempt to cancel our voices, the good news is the ekklesia, the kahal, the messianic congregation, the church cannot be canceled and the Word of God cannot be bound. And after laying out the seriousness of these issues, I then take the second half of the book, but most of the chapters in the book with practical strategies, parents, professors in schools, people in the business place, kids in school, the whole wide range, preachers, pastors, leaders, practical strategies, one after the other, not just practical, inspirational, that'll get your stand. There's even a special new holiday we're announcing, a day to celebrate our faith in a public and bold way, which I talk about in the last chapter of the book. I have no question that this book will really impact you.

In fact, one of the folks that wrote an endorsement for it is John Cooper, the lead singer and songwriter of Skillet. And he was moved and stirred as he's a bold public witness. The book moved and stirred him. So you can, excuse me, you can pre-order your signed numbered copy on our website. You can order it wherever you get your books, Christian book, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. You can pre-order a signed numbered copy on our website. That is askdrbrown.org.

You'll see it right on the homepage. And these kind of become like collector's item because each one's numbered. If you ordered the first copy or the 50th or the 75th or the 120th, whatever.

So it's numbered. And then I haven't come up with the scripture I'm going to use yet, but I think about it. Then I say, what's the right scripture to write in this, the friendly put that in, subscribe it to you and sign it.

Yeah, do it myself. It's my joy to do it. We pray over the books and, and one request we make when you get the book, if it blesses you, take a picture of the book or you holding it and post it on social media, tell other people and then go to Amazon and post a review, excuse me, post a review or leave a rating there. So you'll be blessed. This will stir you. I believe that we continue to see a rising up. Now we're not supposed to angry take over and beat you heathen down and force you to believe what you believe. That has nothing. That spirit, that attitude has nothing to do with the gospel.

Absolutely not. Rather we cause our light to shine and that light changes lives and that light drives back darkness. That's what we do in Yeshua. So this book will stir you, bless you, help you, equip you, pre-order your signed copy.

We normally get the books in right before the general public does with COVID printing of books has gotten very iffy, but hopefully we'll have them in advance, sign them and get them out to you early in March if not before. Okay, back to the phones. 866-34-TRUTH. Let's go to Joan in Greenville, South Carolina. Welcome to the line of fire.

Thank you. My question is, and this may be a very simplistic question and you may have addressed it before, but I'm not sure, but what did Jewish people believe today will get them to heaven? So Jewish people don't think about heaven as much as Christians do.

In other words, there's not as much emphasis on the afterlife. It's more a matter of pleasing God in this life and living a righteous life. However, they do believe that as righteous people, it's good in God's sight and puts them in better standing. So maybe we could say, what does a Jew believe they need to do today to be right with God and to receive forgiveness of their sins? So they would believe that to the best of their ability, they need to observe the commandments of the Torah in the light of Jewish tradition, you know, as the rabbis teach. They would believe where they fall short, they need to repent and ask God for mercy and forgiveness and that by repenting, they would demonstrate that by turning away from those wrong things.

They would also believe that doing good deeds and giving charity, that those are positive, virtuous things, that praying is a positive and virtuous thing, and that they may go through some suffering in their life and that is part of a way of paying for their sins. So obviously we would find those answers sadly lacking and saying that without the blood of the Messiah, there is no atonement with no temple and no means of atonement, you can pray and repent all you want but something is still missing. But that would be the Jewish perspective. That's why we as followers of Jesus share the good news of the Messiah with Jew and Gentile alike. But that would be a Jewish perspective. These are things that Jew needs to do to be in right relationship with God. So when the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament, they just simply thought that was an earthly kingdom? No. A man messiah?

Yeah, yeah. So basically many of the verses that we look at as messianic prophecy like Isaiah 53 or a foretelling of the Messiah's death in Psalm 22, they don't read as messianic. The ones they read as messianic would be about like Isaiah 11 where the Messiah will rule and reign on the earth. So he will be a highly exalted human being and powerfully anointed by the Spirit but in their view, yes, he would still be just a human being not divine and they would not believe that the Messiah would die for our sins. So when Jesus came and fulfilled the prophecies of the suffering servant and died for our sins and rose from the dead, many of them rejected that. They were looking for someone else and they even rejected the witness once he rose from the dead and the Spirit was poured out and that's really where the greater judgment came.

In other words, okay, they didn't get things right initially but when he rose from the dead that settled the argument and the leadership as a whole or by and large still rejected him and is still praying for the coming of Messiah. When you see it through Jewish eyes, it makes sense. When you read the scriptures through Jewish eyes, it makes sense. We have a very different perspective and through our eyes, we read it and think how can you not see it? They read the same text and see it very differently, especially you're raised a certain way, you read the scriptures a certain way.

You know, just like if someone was raised a Jehovah's Witness, that's what they're taught so they read the Bible wrongly. They would say that's what we're doing. We would say to the Jewish people, that's what you're doing. So we pray for Jewish people to be saved. You say, but what about this God-fearing rabbi who lived in Iraq and who had no connection with Christian community and all he knew about Christians were their Jew haters and he feared God and prayed all of his life and prayed daily for the coming of Messiah. Well, God will deal with every person fairly.

I leave God to be the judge of each person but I do declare that salvation is found only in Yeshua. Yes. Okay. Thank you so much. You are, you are very welcome. All right. My habit, I was going to give out the number, but with two minutes left in the broadcast, doesn't make sense.

All right. This happened in America, in Orlando, Florida. Now it wasn't tens of thousands of people, but it's just important to draw attention to this. So I'm looking at a headline on all Israel news. That's all Israel.com and it says this, shocking videos capture neo-nazis rally in Florida chanting, the Jew is the devil. Now the pictures, you know, it's, it's, it's just a handful of people, but the fact that this is still there, the fact that this is being shouted out must be mentioned and must be plainly and categorically rebuked. May these people wake up to reality and come to repentance and repudiate these destructive, ugly, hateful, demonic views. The article says horrifying videos of a neo-nazi rally on Saturday in Orlando, Florida have emerged on social media with footage of about 20 participants chanting antisemitic slogans, such as the Jew is the devil and Jews rape children and drink their blood and other videos shared by stopantisemitism.org. The group can be seen stomping on the Israeli flag and assaulting a driver in his car. The NGO posted the footage and asked, why are local PD allowing this?

Yeah. So the problem is, okay, this is crazy, extreme group, 20 people, but a lot of the sentiments are widely held. I don't mean by the majority of Americans, but I mean by countless thousands and maybe even millions in America and certainly around the world. And we deal with it because the moment we confront certain antisemitic prominent teacher speakers on YouTube, especially if they profess to be Christian, we get blasted with all these kinds of comments from people who profess to be Christian as well. May the light expose the darkness. We never again see the evil of the Holocaust in our world. All right, friends, we've got a special broadcast answering some of your toughest questions tomorrow. You don't want to miss it. Another program powered by the truth network.