On Jesus Being Friends with the World and Falsely Calling People False Teachers Without the Whole Story - Comment on an Allen Parr YouTube Video

Concerning a YouTube video by Allen Parr, "Jesus Would Be a FALSE TEACHER if He Lived Among Us Today...Here's Why" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTS6UFET5oY, retrieved July 29, 2021).  This answer was too long to give in the comments, so I gave a shorter one there, but this is what I was planning to say in the comments of that video.

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1) Jesus wasn't agreeing with their falsehoods, and He called them out.  He didn't just party with them and say nothing when they spoke falsehoods like otherwise true teachers do when they associate with false teachers today.  In the Church, we have specific guidance on not associating with siblings in Christ who live in unrepentant sin.  These are not unbelievers that we must not associate with, but believers!  So the hypocritical Pharisees is not equivalent with this rule that we use to base our action of not associating with false teachers who are Christians, but those Pharisees are equivalent with unbelievers, which we have a mandate to walk around circumspectly with gentleness and wisdom, which is a stark contrast to our mandate in the Church to disassociate from believers who live in unrepentant sin (not as enemies, but as siblings in Christ, giving their bodies over to Satan to be hurt in order to get them to stop their sin; saved people can sin, because salvation is not dependent on stopping sin - 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; Romans 10:9, 10, 13).  Jesus was dealing directly with those in authority of the whole nation of Israel, and dealing with those Pharisees was part of His mandate as the King of Israel; His authority was above theirs, just as He had authority to clean out the temple with a weapon!  Picture it and understand that His association with the Pharisees was different from us putting ourselves under the authority of a false teacher (of the World) or associating with a Christian (not of the World) who lives in unrepentant sin.

Luke 11:37 is an interesting situation.  Jesus goes to the Pharisees house, waits for him to (in our normal behavior, merely) marvel that Jesus didn't wash His hands before eating, and then Jesus *laid into* them with many rebukes.  Read it.  It's fun and enlightening.  And it's 180 degrees from what we do if we find ourselves in some intimate setting in the presence of a false teacher - some of us, at best, might quietly leave, don't you think?  Jesus *called* *them* *out*!  This is different from us.  Luke 14:1 is the same.  Jesus isn't hanging out with them; He's instructing them and calling out their utter incompetence to be rulers of His people.  He's showing that they are false in their teachings.

This is the opposite of tacitly agreeing with a false teacher due to completely ignoring what they say on the same stage, at the same house, in front of the same group of people who hears that false teacher and then hears you.

Allen seems to diminish this point at around 3 minutes in the video, where he makes the hypothetical situation to ignore any context of what was going on and reduce it to merely being in the same room, eating.  Whereas eating together does suggest friendship, it doesn't necessitate it, and so reducing the situation to such a snapshot is still not equivalent with the real situations that Allen is speaking about in our culture - especially "sharing a stage", where words are heard and context is known.  Allen is also speaking about our snap judgements when we see a mere picture - in this, he is right to suggest that we don't judge without knowledge, but the Bible already tells us that in a separate lesson (Proverbs 18:13), and Allen doesn't need to mix that lesson in with this by reducing the context of hanging out with a false teacher to our ignorant witness of two people in the same picture.  Christian teachers *are* cooperating with false teachers, and that's *bad*.

2) It's similar to (1).  Jesus was doing a special mission to those under the Law.  He still wasn't accepting the sinfulness of the people He was helping, but He waited for sinners to be humbled by their sinfulness and yearning toward Him for help, and then He helped them.  This is different from a Christian hanging out in the corner of a bar, trying not to look at the lewd dancing, saying nothing but thinking that merely being there, smiling or whatnot, will be enough to draw people toward Jesus or some similar, misguided mission.  Don't be friends with the World!  Jesus wasn't, even in these very real biblical examples of His interactions with sinners - He died for His enemies.  We can also help our enemies by drawing them out to become Christians, through preaching salvation doctrine (see 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 and Romans 10:9, 10, 13).  It's not hanging out with sinners to tell the World that they are sinners going to Hell, but - good news - Jesus, who never sinned, became sin for us and suffered the outcome of sin when He cried out to God, "Why have You forsaken me?", and He died for our sins, was buried, then God raised Him from the dead on the third day, and He was seen afterward by many witnesses, and so we call on His name for salvation by verbally confessing Master Jesus.

2b) Allen is bearing down on that lesson about us judging things without evidence, and he's using this concept about Jesus hanging out with sinners as the evidence of that.  We have that lesson directly in Proverbs.  Allen is changing the reality of what Jesus was doing in order to have his evidence to back up the lesson we have in Proverbs, and Allen does not need, in order to support that lesson in Proverbs, to twist what Jesus was doing in order to validate the act of an otherwise true teacher cooperating with false teachers by sharing their stage without calling them out for their false teaching.  We should understand and practice the lesson of finding out the real facts before commenting or concluding things about it.

2c) Levi gave a dinner for Jesus.  Why would sinners go to such a dinner?  Because they were humbled sinners who knew they were sinners and needed God and needed what Jesus said about God.  This is not the same as a similar dinner today would be, where sinners would proudly try to shut down Jesus' preaching of the truth about God in order to self-validate their sin.  See Luke 5:31-32 for Jesus' reasoning about this issue.  It's the same as when Jesus fed the crowds - they were not the type of sinners of the World who hated the things of God, but they were the type of sinners who wanted to hear Jesus preach about God!  That's the opposite type of sinner, which changes the context entirely from the horrific thing that happens today of true preachers saying nothing about false preachers who share a venue with them.  That's so horrible a thing to do, that it alone becomes evidence against the teacher of truth - why didn't he say anything?  Is it because he would lose contacts and the ability to be invited to the venue the next time?  Is it for money?  They truth-seeking Church not living in unrepentant sin could make our own venues..

Allen continues (6:20) to guess that it was a wicked party that Jesus went to!  I think he's making that guess in order to contrive evidence to teach the lesson in Proverbs 18:13.  There's a difference between sinful people who are humbled by their sinfulness and who seek God to save them from it and people who are proud in their sinfulness and do not seek God for salvation from it but seek more sinfulness instead.

3) What?!  It's downright false to claim that Jesus didn't desire to project meanings created by adding His words together!  Jesus *IS* the Word of God!  He knows how to talk in order to convey the meanings He desired.  It's true that today, we talk differently than they did then, but the point is that *they* understood His normal conversation even if we have to think hard about it.

I'm going to say things that might not be totally accurate in this paragraph.  I've told you, so understand that I'm trying to help, but I'm surmising some:  Usually, we must weight the little words and what we consider to be extra phrases more heavily than we're used to in order to get the fuller meanings, and we don't allow for the deeper truth in a seemingly impossible command of Jesus without it being explained to us, because, in part, we as a society have been purposely dumbed down to what used to be about a grade-school logic and verbal understanding.  

Now, back to harder facts.  Luke 14:26 means what Jesus said, except "hate" is comparative instead of absolute.  Done.  Now do you understand that Jesus meant exactly what He was saying in that passage?  It is a deep truth that we must prefer God to others and self enough to behave toward others and self as though we hated them when loving God is at risk by loving (in action) those others or self.  That's not a wreckless teaching of Christ, it's a straightforward and useful one.  John 6:56 is also a straight teaching and not anything hard to those who understand metaphor, which the disciples did.  The deeper truth remains true: we must identify with (eat) Jesus brokenness (enduring the World's attacks on us) and accept (drink) His blood (death) in order to be His.  Or, to put it the right way around, we who are His do endure the World's attacks (because they hate both our Master and His servants) and accept death to the old self when we are born again.  That's true and not any strange teaching at all.  Just the language used is colorful.  Self-mutilation is the surface reaction to Jesus' teaching of plucking out the eye or cutting off the hand, but the deeper truth does remain in His teaching, that sin without any savior would be bad enough that self-mutilating *would* be the logically necessary reaction to keep oneself from it (if there was no Savior).  Is my interpretation off?  Even if it is off, Jesus meant some definite thing with the teaching, and our misunderstanding of it doesn't invalidate it or make it outrageously false.  Again, Allen seems to be driving at a point about our judgement of what we don't have full knowledge of, and he's making all these claims about what Jesus was doing in order to contrive evidence to support his true teaching that is easily expressed in the Proverbs passage.  What Jesus said in these passages *is* what He meant.  We are simply undisciplined readers of the full context given in the Bible and are far away from the type of speech commonly employed at the time (and, sometimes, our translations make the meaning fuzzier than it was in the ears of those hearers; I've been talking a bit like they did, and doesn't it sound somewhat strange?  If not, then nevermind, but continue to understand, okay?  Their speech might have been more visual than ours and less piece-meal-definite, too, if you see what I mean, but however they talked, they meant the meanings behind it and Jesus spoke to be understood by the crowds, except when He spoke in parables).  Jesus said what He meant.  But Allen is really teaching us the true teaching about gaining context in order to fully understand what is meant before concluding the matter in heart and speech.

I know my answer has been long, but there's confusion in this video, and it takes a bit to untangle it.  The main points are that Jesus was not hanging out with or agreeing with or cooperating with the Pharisees in the same sense that Christian teachers *do* cooperate with false teachers today.  He didn't present Himself around the wicked actions of sinners - He did the opposite of that by allowing sinners who humbly wanted to to hear Him preaching truth.  He didn't say strange things, but He meant what He said.  Allen falsely pushes toward our acceptance of the World as friends by saying Jesus did that so Allen could contrive evidence for the true teaching, given in Proverbs 18:13, that we should not judge what's happening before getting all the evidence for it.

This is a rare evidence against Allen as a false teacher in these two regards: he promoted friendship with the World, and he willingly slighted our Master Jesus (as though He was going to lewd parties) so that Allen could seem to have evidence of not judging a thing without the full evidence.  Did I miss Allen taking back his false evidence that that's what Jesus was doing?  Sometimes I get things reversed.  Was Allen not, indeed, teaching, especially in his first and second points, that Jesus *was* hanging out with sinners in a way we deem as evil?

I think that at the end of this video, Allen has not spoken against the false teachings against Jesus' character (if he intended to prank us with what only sounds like him promoting those falsehoods about our Master, and if he intended to take back those false examples he made of Christ), promoting what many in the Social Gospel base their friendship with the World on - that Jesus ate with sinners, so why shouldn't I go to this sex party over here and just drink ginger ale as a witness for God, or some such iniquities.

It's sadly, extremely ironic.

aasmp.blogspot.com
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Here's the comment I did give, which sums it all up:

Allen seems to be promoting the idea that Jesus' eating with sinners was the same as the type of eating with sinners that is so prevalent today, but - when all the evidence is understood - we can see that Jesus was eating with humbled sinners who wanted to hear His preaching about God, and that's the opposite of eating with proud sinners who do not want to hear true preaching about God.  Jesus was tearing down stronghold's of falsehood that raised themselves against the truth of God when He spoke with Pharisees, but when our preachers of truth share a stage with false preachers, then they tacitly promote them by not speaking against those wicked strongholds.  Just because Jesus forgave sinners, that doesn't mean we should be friends with the World.

That being said, I think Allen is actually trying to teach a whole different lesson, which we have in Proverbs 18:13, that we should not conclude a thing without full knowledge of the evidence.  Allen doesn't need to side with the Social Gospellers in order to have evidence for that.

aasmp.blogspot.com

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