I love the reaction Jillian Michaels has to the truth of Jesus' existence. So many people think that Jesus didn't even exist, that he was like the Tooth Fairy. But when people hear the truth, what a joy to see the scales fall from their eyes.
Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thanks for being here. Someone asked me yesterday or two days ago. So what are you doing for Thanksgiving? And I said, Oh, I don't know.
What are you like?
What are you doing for the Fourth of July Thanksgiving? It's like forever away. You're talking about it's a week away.
So I say that here because in the next couple of days, our episodes, we will have a celebration of the Puritans and our pilgrims, my favorite people. Oh, love the pilgrims. I can't speak enough about the Pilgrims. They're the best. They're just the best. And I will prove it over the next few days when we do a humble attempt to celebrate these amazing people.
This is our heritage. These Pilgrims are our heritage. It is a crime, purposeful, to disconnect us from these people who founded this country. These are our true founders. We talk about our founding fathers. These are our founding grandfathers.
They did incredible things and for all the right reasons. So we'll talk about them in the days to come. I want to share this here, including the preacher, the main preacher of the church, these Puritans, because the Puritans, they started in England, of course, but then they went to Amsterdam for 12 years and things didn't go well there. We'll talk about why next time. And when they went to England, or when they went to New England, there was a sermon that the preacher gave from the boat about Ezra 821.
So we'll talk about that.
But I want to play this instead, and maybe this can be encouraging to you before we go into Thanksgiving gatherings. This is a video of Jillian Michaels and Victor Davis Hanson. That's a fun video, and I don't know how much you can tell it from listening to it. But Jillian Michaels, who, by the way, is married, married to a woman, she's been going out with him. conservative kind of awakening. How shocked she is as VDH goes into the historical confirmation of Jesus outside of the Bible itself.
And Jillian Michaels is blown away. She's never heard this stuff before, can't believe that this was true, but also loves it at the same time.
Jesus the Magician was written by a scholar at Columbia that showed that, I don't necessarily agree with his thesis, but there were a lot of people that were traveling magicians, and Christ was the best one, and that also bothered the Romans, and he was able to create mass populist Sermon on the Mount stuff. And then the message, you've got to remember that the message...
I thought we didn't even know this guy. This is going to infuriate people, and I'm so sorry, and I stay out of it. But I thought we weren't even really sure whether or not Jesus existed, and the apostles wrote this stuff hundreds of years later.
No, no, the Romans knew. We have Roman documents completely separate from religion that he was a magnetic, he was a romantic, wonderful person to the people who knew him and he had staged a revolution and that that presented a problem in this troublesome Province and how the Romans ran Judea as they ran everything they had client Kings Herod So they would go to the Jews or the Gaul anybody and say you're going to be the regent here This is the protocol. We have Roman legions to keep you in line, but we want this and it's basically a question of taxes control and in exchange for that we give you roads and aqueducts and habeas corpus and Civilization and that was a deal.
So the way by the way that we go into the developing world.
Yes, and so there were Regent Kings and then you always had a provincial Roman official, like Pilate, who had a temporary, you know, assignment, and he was the ultimate judge. So, his whole point was, I don't want to get into this stuff between this new offshoot of Judaism called Christianity, and this guy Jesus and the Orthodox, but I do know, I don't know what he did, but I know that it's troublesome. Both, he's got a new religion, and unfortunately it's turned the other cheek. Brotherhood of man, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor. That's not Roman.
We have a Roman military ethos, that the strong inherit the earth, and if an enemy offends you, you hit him twice. And this guy is preaching something very different. And oh, by the way, the local Orthodoxy doesn't like him either. So we'll just wash my hands of it and say, how do we kill two birds with one stone, i . e. not have them angry at us so that and not have this revolutionary new sect, so what we'll do is, we'll get Pilate and he'll say, well, I washed my hands of it, but since these guys think he's guilty, I'll let him kill him, and then we'll blame them.
But at the same time, with the Apostles and the next two generations, they were being killed systematically in Rome by Romans that had nothing to do with Jews.
Right, right.
Yeah, so when anybody says that the Jews killed kill Jesus, it's more like the Romans wanted a quiet province and they did not like Jesus and what he represented was anti -Roman. It was a popular revolt they thought could happen. And there was an orthodoxy that they had come to terms with and used them to keep the peace. So they said basically, well, in Judaism, in Judea, the Jewish establishment, the religious establishment doesn't like him any more than we do. So we can get rid of him and then say the Pharisees basically did it.
This is so wild. I'm sorry, I know it's not wild for people who know this information, but I genuinely thought, okay, the Jews had the Old Testament, the Torah, and then maybe there was this guy Jesus. The apostles wrote stuff, but the first guy who wrote something was like, you know, 90 or so years later. We think maybe there's some Dead Sea Scrolls, kind of mentioned this guy Jesus, but then constantly had a, what, the Council of Nicaea or something like that?
He had a vision of the Milliman Bridge that all of a sudden he saw crossing the sky and he flipped the entire empire. So under Diocletian and other recent emperors, they were completely banned and they were executed because they were too revolutionary. Christianity because they could deal with the Jews because the Jews Judaism was localized in a particular area at that time and It was a particular group of people but Christianity said that anybody could get to heaven Through the combination of what would become the New Testament in the Old Testament And so the Romans said you know what this has an ability to be it's kind of like what Islam would do later This can infect everybody because it's not it's not ethnic or anything It's very dangerous and then all of a sudden Constantine was flipped 300 years after the death of Christ. And then they took all of the Roman rituals that had been used to oppress Christianity and turned them upside down. So when you see a cardinal with a purple and the pointed hat, that's all from the Roman legate and provincial system. And when you look even today, the organization of the Roman Catholic Church, it mimics the divisions in the empire.
They took the whole administrative system that the empire had, and they flipped it over to advance and institutionalize Christianity.
Okay.
It's a fun clip, isn't it? So Jillian Michaels is, again, married to a woman. She's been on the left her whole life, but I think just through default. And she's going in this process of awakening. I say default because again, the opening comment she said was, wait, wait, I thought we weren't even sure that Jesus existed. It's one thing to say that Jesus wasn't actually the son of God.
It's another to deny that he was even a person who walked around. So Jillian Michaels is going through a bit of an awakening on her own. By the way, I want to take back the word woke, or I shouldn't say take it back because we never made it up the word woke, but I want woke to be a word. us because it's actually a biblical concept first. Ephesians 5 .14 says, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.
Awake, awake, O sleeper. What's a sleeper? The Greek word here for sleeper is someone who yields to sloth and sin or someone who is indifferent to their salvation. So wake up, you who are indifferent to your salvation. Arise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Wake up.
Romans 13 11. Besides this, you know the time that the time has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. " Isaiah 52, 1 says, Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion, put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city, for there shall no more come into you the uncircumcised and the unclean. But awake, awake, wake up.
This is the original wake. Be awakened from your spiritual sleep. Be awakened from the darkness that you live on. Get the scales off your eyes and see the truth. It's time to be woke. Anyway, that's why I want to take back the word woke.
So just about the history of Jesus, that Jesus actually was a real person. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, they wrote their gospels after Jesus died, rose, and ascended. Mark was 40 years later. Matthew was 50 years later. John was 65 years later. Matthew and John knew Jesus personally.
Mark was close with Peter. Luke was close with Paul. They all based their writings on witness testimony. Of course, it was all the work of the Holy Spirit. But I love Jillian Michaels being aghast at Jesus even being a real person. I distinctly remember, this was before I was a Christian, I was in a seminar in college, and I remember this room, I don't even know how we got up because it was about the Vietnam War or something, but everyone in this seminar, so like 15 people, were talking about how Jesus wasn't real.
Now, I wasn't a Christian at the time at all, but everyone was talking about how he wasn't real, like he was like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, like straight up not real. never existed, not a real person, figment of our imagination.
All of it.
All of him. I remember thinking, hey, I'm not a Christian, but he was definitely like a guy. He was definitely like a real person that walked around. Liar, lunatic, or lord. These people in college say he didn't even exist. But there were a lot of historians who admitted that Jesus existed.
And they were contemporaries of Jesus Tacitus. Roman historian wrote about Jesus in 116 AD, wrote about the persecution of Christians. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote just within a few decades of Jesus's death, he talked about Jesus. Pliny the Younger mentioned Jesus as well in his writings. He wrote about how Christians would meet regularly and sing songs to Christ as to a God. Actually, I'm going to quote this, just so you don't think I'm making this up.
This is Pliny the Younger writing to the Emperor Trajan, 112, 112 AD. Pliny said, It is my custom, sir, to refer to you in all cases where I do not feel sure for who can better direct my doubts or inform my ignorance. I have never been present at any legal examination of the Christians, and I do not know, therefore, what are the usual penalties passed upon them, or the limits of those penalties, or how searching and inquiry should be made. I have hesitated a great deal in considering whether any distraction should be made. according to the ages of the accused, whether the weak should be punished as severely as the more robust, whether if they renounce their faith they should be pardoned." " So he's like, hmm, we've got these Christian people, how should we punish them? And what's too far? Does it matter if they're old or young? What if they're weak or strong? What if they renounce their faith, should we pardon them? Or whether the man who has once been a Christian should gain nothing by recanting. So if they, if they recant, should we let them go? Or nah, anytime you even mention, you know, say that Jesus is Lord, that's it for you, no matter what. Whether the name itself, even though otherwise innocent of crime, should be punished or only the crimes that gather around it. So should you get them for worshiping Jesus or should you get them for all these other crimes? In the meantime, this is the plan which I have adopted in the case of those Christians who have been brought before me. I ask them whether they are Christians. If they say yes, then I repeat the question a second and a third time, warning them of the penalties it entails, and if they still persist, I order them to be taken away to prison until the Roman governor has arrived."
He goes on and says, "...but they declared that the sum of their guilt or their error only amounted to this, that on a stated day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak and to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ, as though he were a God, and that so far from binding themselves by oath to commit any crime, their oath was to abstain." from theft, robbery, adultery, and from breach of faith. " So he's like far from this being like a criminal group. Their oath was to not break the law and not to deny trust, money placed in the keeping when called upon to deliver it. When the ceremony was concluded, it had been their custom to depart and meet again to take food. Same thing we do now after church, after church lunch. But it was no special character and quite harmless.
And they had ceased this practice after the edict in which in accordance with your orders, I had forbidden all secret societies. It's great. That was only like year 112, he wrote that letter. Jesus was real. The Christians who knew him were willing to go to their death. I'm very encouraged by the spreading of the gospel and the truth of Jesus and God to many people.
There'll be many new people who are gonna hear the truth for really the first time, even though they've grown up in a so -called Christian country. And I'm encouraged when I hear stories like Jillian Michaels here who are amazed by what they've never heard before and curious to know more.
It's great.
Let me give you one of my favorite facts about Jesus that when, when I was not a Christian, I was reading my first apologetics book, Frank Turk, not enough faith to be an atheist. It makes the point that all the new Testament documents were written just within a few decades of Jesus's crucifixion. And there are 5 ,300 Greek manuscripts of the new Testament, 5 ,300. And still people are like, I don't know if he existed. Does anyone question if Plato existed? Anyone like, I don't know about that Plato guy.
I don't think he was real. There are only 250 known manuscripts of Plato's works that survive. And those date back, even though he was alive in about 400 BC, those date back to the year 900. So you've got like 1300 years between the actual Plato, like Plato the guy. 1 ,300 years before Plato the god. and the earliest documents we have of his.
1 ,300 years and no one questions Plato's existence. Yet for Jesus, these are contemporaries who wrote of him and people are like, I don't think so. And again, it's one thing to say you don't think he's Lord or God and all, like that's fine. The son of God, but it's another bit like, I don't think he exists.
It's great.
So super grateful, more people being woke, the good woke, the biblical woke. And let's just pray for more. I may have read Titus 3 the other day. I don't know if I did, but even if I did, it's worth it again. I love this section. He says, remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities.
Talking to Titus and his church. Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, to show perfect courtesy towards all people. And that's what Pliny was talking about. He's like, ah, man, these guys are like really good people. I don't even know what to get them on. But here's the best part.
For we ourselves, were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. " We can't be boastful about those things. who are not Christians yet, or who are new and working through it.
We can't be boastful because that was us not long ago. And also don't be discouraged by those who scoff, who don't believe in the truth of Jesus in the Bible. The fools will scoff.
That's fine.
But you also never know whose eyes you can help open, just like yours were. Praise God. Hopefully that's encouraging as we go into this Thanksgiving season. Maybe have some more interactions and encounters with people. You never know. Mike Slater, diallocals . com, transcript. and no commercials over there. Mike Slater out, Locals .
