Been listening. Still on the first one. The one who alternates between being Jewish and being Christian is very deceptive.

That would be Dr. Brown. I'm in agreement with his opponent, Steve Gregg. I also used to be dispensationalist/Zionist but came out of that with a lot of help from listening to Steve Gregg's teachings.

Good! I have Zionist evangelical relatives, and it was seeing their beliefs that caused me to reject Christianity growing up. Ironically, it was a Jewish rabbi that taught me what "Israel" really means and that Zionism is wrong. That was a necessary piece for me to understand Christ (in as much as I do, which i think is still incomplete).

Interesting. I would love to hear how that Jewish rabbi explained the meaning of "Israel".

To summarize, Israel is not a racial people ; its everyone who belongs to God. I'm pretty sure he didn't mention Jesus (don't remember), but if Israel is the body of believers, then Israel is synonymous with Christ or Logos, depending on how those words are being used. That wasn't that guy saying that, but I think it follows. One important thing, for me, was learning that not all Jews are Zionists. They don't all want a nation state, and definitely don't all want genocide there. Some have specifically chosen not to immigrate to there because they don't think Israel means a nation state. A nation, sure, but that's super vague, and the concept of a nation state didn't even exist until the Peace of Westphalia, just a couple hundred years ago, and even then it wasn't really until ww1 that nation states became ethnic nation states. So Israel simply can't mean what the Zionists want it to mean.

I recently heard someone say, and I think it's true, You don't interpret the New Testament in light of the Old Testament, but rather you interpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. A big disagreement that I could see between Michael Brown and Steve Gregg is that Michael Brown takes many of the Old Testament prophecies literally and therefore says they have not yet been fulfilled. Steve Gregg takes them spiritually and therefore says that they have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. So the question is, who is interpreting the scriptures correctly?

Gregg is. But I haven't finished listening, so... But it seems like Gregg is. Brown hasn't gotten all the lessons from his rabbis, or he's pretending not to know. There's a fairly complex symbology used in Judaism for understanding scripture, involving numbers and the pictographic meaning of individual letters in their alphabet. Some of the OT books were planned letter by letter, not simply to tell a story, but to have deeper meaning that can only be understood by referring to the meaning of the letter (like Aleph was an ox head, etc) and the numbers. Like, you know how the bible repeats specific numbers a lot? Especially 3, 6, 7, 77, and 40. They're not literal counts of years. I don't remember all the meanings, but it's called "kabbalah" if you want to research it. And it has to be interpreted this way, or at least in some non literal way. There's not really an option to be a literalist because biblical literalism gives us this - genocide in Palestine. If God is good, then we can say with certainty that God doesn't want genocide. And if the Bible is divinely inspired, then putting the two together, you get a circle that can't be squared, if its literal. Only symbolic meaning can step in and change the equation. Or its not divinely inspired. One or both must be true, if you start from the premise that God is good. But besides, there were times when Jesus clarified the meaning if scripture, like when the Pharisees tried using it against him or that rich guy thought he was following it. It looks yo me like the original intent of the written scripture was lost over time. They became literalists and started tyrannising each other. How dare you do work on the Sabbath day! And Jesus was like, no you retard, that doesn't mean that. So we have to use Jesus' clarifications to look at the OT.

Right. We have to interpret the Scripture, Old and New Testaments, as Jesus and the Apostles did. It seems as as though Dr. Brown (and all Zionists) interpret the Scriptures the way the Jews of Jesus' day did, and we know how wrong they got things, to the point that many failed to recognize the Messiah and even put Him to death.