Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
So I saw a video on YouTube that was calling me a snake and a liar and telling me that I need to stop lying about the Master's College
because I had said that there are instructors down there teaching them that it was disrespectful not to use the name Yahweh for God, but instead to just use Lord.
And I stated that in my sermon because they have this new Bible translation called the Legacy Standard Bible that instead of saying Lord, it says Yahweh over and over again.
And I had said that at their seminary, the instructors teach the students that it's disrespectful to just use Lord and not distinguish the name Yahweh.
Okay. And I was called a liar and a snake and everything else. Well, you know, the instructor that I was referring to is Dr. Bill Barak.
Okay. And he said statements along these lines a whole bunch of times. But, you know, I jumped on their channel and just, you know, spent some time searching to see if I could find the part where he said that.
And I did find one of the parts where he spoke along those lines and he didn't use the word disrespectful, but he said it was an abuse and misuse of names.
And so I'm going to go ahead and play this for you to show that I was not lying when I said that because that is what this instructor, Bill Barak, is teaching down there.
So I'm going to play up, you know, several minutes of this because I want you to hear the context of what he's saying.
Okay. And to show that these people are falsely accusing me because, you know, well, you'll hear you'll hear for yourself what they're teaching down there.
Okay. So let me play some of this here. And just for context, if you want to go and listen to the entire lecture, this is on the Masters Seminary YouTube channel.
And it's the biblical Hebrew grammar second semester. And this is lecture number three. Okay.
And the relevant portions are around like, I don't know, the maybe like 10 to 20 minutes in or something like that.
So here, let me play some of this for you.
Okay. My thoughts on using the term Yahweh. I think that we should use it more often.
I think we need to use it in the pulpit. I think we need to teach our people that this is the name of God.
The only reason it isn't pronounced is because of a group of heretical Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, nearly 250 years before Christ,
who decided with a erroneous understanding of the third commandment, saying not to take the name of the Lord in vain,
that they then understood that as meaning not to pronounce the name Yahweh.
Okay. So real quick, you know, so far he said that we need to be using it. We need to be using the term Yahweh in the pulpit.
And then, you know, he correctly explains that it stopped being pronounced because of the Jews being superstitious and misunderstanding the third commandment.
Okay. So let's keep going.
But just this practice then led over to the Septuagint because these were the translators of the Septuagint who did this.
And it became Kurios, Lord, and that has been followed all the way down through.
It was practiced by the Latin translation of the Septuagint that was done before the time of Jerome.
Jerome continued that because he could not get it reversed.
It was considered to be dogma by the time he did his translation in 400 A.D.
And then, of course, all the English translations were based upon the usage of the Latin Vulgate,
which was based upon the usage of the Greek Septuagint.
Okay. What he just said there is complete garbage because he left out one glaring fact,
which is that the New Testament never uses the tetragrammaton in its original Greek.
So if we read an original Greek New Testament, it just uses the word Kurios, which means Lord.
And it uses it all the time, and it doesn't distinguish between just the basic word for Lord
and the proper name of God, the tetragrammaton. It's just the same word, just Kurios, every single time.
So he's trying to claim, oh, well, the Septuagint did that, and then the Latin Vulgate got it from the Septuagint,
and that our English Bibles are following the Vulgate.
So he's claiming that the reason that the King James and other English Bibles are using Lord
instead of Yahweh or the tetragrammaton, he's claiming it's because they're following the Vulgate.
No, they're following the New Testament. He jumps from Septuagint to Vulgate to English.
He skips this giant step of the New Testament. The New Testament just calls him Lord.
Okay. And that alone defeats his entire point, but isn't it amazing how he just skips over that
and just deceptively says, well, it went from Septuagint to Vulgate to English,
leaves out the fact that the New Testament does it too. Okay. So let's keep going here.
And so Yahweh is the best way to go, and that is the way it is most likely to have been pronounced.
And I love how he switches mid-sentence. He's like, that is the name of God.
That is the way that it was most likely pronounced. He starts out that sentence so confident.
That's it. That's the name. That's the way it was most likely pronounced.
In another video, he said, well, there's a 75 percent chance that that's how it's pronounced
or 75 percent of Jewish and Christian scholars pronounce it that way or something.
No one has any clue how that name is pronounced because there's no tape recording from thousands of years ago.
The original had no vowels, and so it could have been pronounced an innumerable number of ways.
And so, you know, he isn't even confident. It's just funny how he tries to sound all bold.
That is the name. And then in the middle of the sentence, he has to go, well, most likely.
Anyway, sorry, let's keep going. It's almost universally agreed to now.
And so I think we need to distinguish clearly in public reading and in public speech the names of God.
We would not be happy if we confused our names.
If I called, for example, if I referred to Eric as John or Kelly as Jeff, you'd say, wait a minute, don't get us confused.
We're different people.
OK, think about how dumb of an argument that is.
He just basically is saying that if we confuse and he's going to make this clear in a second, you'll hear him.
That if we confuse, like Adonai and Jehovah, you know, Lord with the proper name of God, he compared that to confusing Eric with Jeff and Kelly with Jeff.
Don't confuse us. We're different people.
Well, last time I checked Adonai, Jehovah, God, Lord, they're not different people because God is the Lord, is Jehovah.
It's all God.
So that's a bizarre illustration to say that mixing up names of God is like mixing up Eric with Jeff.
No, because at the end of the day, it's the same God, whether we call him Jehovah, Lord, God Almighty, Lord of hosts, whatever.
So that was just absurd.
But listen to where he goes with this.
Or Kelly as Jeff.
You'd say, wait a minute, don't get us confused.
We're different people.
And if you have a nickname and I take your nickname and I apply your nickname in a wrong situation when I'm introducing you, for example, to a church to candidate for ministry.
If I introduce you by your nickname, that's considered, you know, a faux pas socially.
You just don't do that.
It's an abuse or misuse of names.
You have to learn how to use them in a proper context.
The divine names are very significant and very important.
We ought not to confuse them or abuse them.
And as such, then we ought to distinguish when Lord means Yahweh and when Lord is Adonai.
So notice, he says that if we don't distinguish when Lord means Yahweh and Lord means Adonai, both in written language and in verbal language,
we can't just say Lord for both.
They have to be distinguished.
It's a confusion of divine names or an abuse of divine names.
So I said that their instructors were teaching that it was disrespectful to do this.
He didn't use the word disrespectful in this clip, but he said it's an abuse, misuse of names.
It's a confusion of divine names.
And he said that it would be like if I got up to introduce someone as a candidate for the pastorate and I addressed them by a nickname.
Like, hey, Johnny.
Let's say you had a pastor whose first name is John and I just called him Johnny or something, you know, not giving them proper respect.
Like I'm talking about pastor Jimenez.
Hey, Roger, how you doing?
Or talking about myself, if someone said like, hey, Stevie or something, instead of saying Pastor Anderson, that it's disrespectful.
That's what he was getting at there.
And he flat out said misuse, abuse, confusion.
And in essence, he was saying it was disrespectful, just like it would be disrespectful to use a pastor's nickname in a formal context.
So how am I lying when, you know, I accurately represented what he's teaching here?
He's comparing the fact that we use Lord for both Adonai and the Tetragrammaton.
He's comparing that to using a nickname to address a pastoral candidate.
He's also comparing it to mixing up a guy named Jeff with a guy named Scott or vice versa.
And so, you know, what I said was accurate and you just heard it for yourself.
I mean, let's keep going here.
When Lord is Adonai and if we just do the printing, we can see it in print, Lord and Lord, which is which.
But in pronunciation, they're pronounced the same.
So no one knows the difference.
So I prefer that we maintain that distinction.
Oh, you prefer that, do you?
Well, that's funny because in the New Testament, we just have one word for Lord.
And it's used for both.
And so there is no distinction like that in the New Testament.
You just have the Greek word kyrios, which is for both the Tetragrammaton or just a simple use of the word Lord as in Adon or Adonai, the proper name, Lord.
And so, yeah, he's completely wrong and he's mischaracterizing the argument by ignoring the fact that the New Testament does it.
Greg?
And he definitely was teaching that it was disrespectful because he compared it to calling a pastoral candidate by his nickname, mixing up people's names.
He called it abuse, misuse, etc.
In most cases, I will not if I'm doing just public reading, say, prior to a sermon.
But during the sermon, as I go back to a verse, I will then say it as Yahweh and I'll explain it.
The first time through, I'll explain it.
OK?
Yes, Scott?
Would the Jews use Adonai or Elohim then in secular discussions?
They never use Elohim in place of Yahweh.
OK, right there, that was just an egregious error on his part to say that they never use Elohim in place of Yahweh.
That is baloney because there are scores and scores of examples, especially in the book of Ezekiel.
If you read the book of Ezekiel in your King James Bible, you will see that instead of the all-caps Lord, where it's like capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, you'll see Lord God, and it's the word God that's in all caps.
So you'll have capital G, capital O, capital D.
That represents the tetragrammaton, and that is read as Elohim.
So he's just 100% wrong there.
Anybody who reads Hebrew could easily correct him on that.
Because when you read in the book of Ezekiel, for example, and other places, because where it says Adonai and the tetragrammaton back to back, they don't want to say Adonai, Adonai, they don't want to say Lord, Lord, so they say Lord God.
And they do pronounce the tetragrammaton there as Elohim, and it even has different vowel pointings to show that you pronounce it as Elohim there.
So he's just 100% wrong on that.
That's just a fact.
They'll use Adonai in place of Yahweh, or they'll just say Hashem, Hashem, the name, the same reference here, so that they understand they're talking about Yahweh.
And that brings up a point as far as the construct of the form of Shem.
I don't think anything else beyond that point is relevant.
But anyway, let me just go ahead and play for you this clip that they said I was lying.
So here's me talking on the clip.
These guys down there at John MacArthur's college, their instructors are telling people that it's disrespectful to God to not use his name and to say Lord instead.
Okay, so you're saying Jesus and the apostles disrespected God in all 27 books of the New Testament?
And you heard it yourself, folks, that he flat out said that if you don't distinguish between these uses, and you're just saying Lord for everything, you just say Lord for Adonai, Lord for the tetragrammaton, or what they call Yahweh,
that you're conflating those and you heard all of the things that he said about it.
And yes, he was saying that it was disrespectful.
He didn't use the word disrespectful, but he used the word misuse, abuse, confusion, and he used an illustration that was clearly talking about disrespecting a pastor.
So again, you know, this, this channel biblical Christian content owes me an apology for calling me a liar, when I've demonstrated that, you know, I was just repeating what I heard Dr. Bill Baric saying.
And you know, this is just the clip that I could find just, you know, certain took, I spent like a little less than an hour searching for it.
And that's what I found.
But he said a lot of other similar things too.
Okay, but this, this was just the one that I found tonight, you know, because I just wanted to show that I wasn't lying here.
And then they, to prove me wrong, they play a clip from some Asian guy at the master's college saying something different.
So here's the clip they play.
And we understand that argument. And I think one thing we really want to establish is that there is nothing wrong at all of translating the tetragrammaton as Lord, there's nothing wrong with that to say otherwise would be to condemn the New Testament and we definitely don't want to do that.
Yeah, it sure would be to condemn the New Testament to say otherwise.
So just because they have this Asian guy saying something that's correct that, well, yeah, we can't say that there's anything wrong with using Lord instead because then we'd be condemning the New Testament.
Okay, that doesn't make me a liar for saying that the instructor at the master's college said that because guess what?
A different guy at the master's college, Dr. Bill Baric, did teach his class that it was disrespecting, misusing, abusing the name of God, and that it was just like if I were to mix up two people's names and they're totally different people.
That's what he compared it to. And he said that if we don't distinguish between them, it'd be like calling someone a nickname instead of using their real name.
And that we need to, he didn't say we should, he said we, well, he did say we should, but then he also said we need to use the name. That is his name.
But then he even had to admit like, well, it's the best we can do. We think that's, it's probably most likely, it's almost universally agreed, even though in another video he claimed it was, you know, only 75% of scholars that believe that that's what it is.
Anyway, you know, I'm not trying to kick a dead horse here, but I just wanted to just set the record straight here that, you know, I didn't make this up. And there's the evidence. God bless you. Have a great day.