Episode 281 | The Conquest for Biblical Truth | Guest: Jodell Onstott - Authentic Talks 2.0 with Shanta

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Authentic Talks two point zero, the space for
real conversations that challenge, uplift and awaken the seeker in
all of us. I'm your host, and today we're peeling
back centuries of religious tradition to ask what is biblical
truth really? Joining us is Judell on Staff, an accomplished

(00:22):
author and socio biblical researcher specializing in comparative biblical and
ancient Near Eastern studies. Known for her groundbreaking book Yahweh Exists,
Judell applies rigorous historical, archaeological, and textural analysis to re
examine the foundation of faith as we know it. Her

(00:45):
work isn't just academic, it's fearless, thought provoking and deeply independent,
cutting through tradition to uncover what's buried or ignored. Today
we're diving into her latest release, Does Jesus Exists? The
quest for Biblical truth and the suffering servant of our

(01:05):
modern world, and this powerful new work investigates whether Jesus
represents a continuation of divine law or a departure from it,
and how the theological distortion may have reshaped the truth.
She's been featured in Tim Mahone's Patterns of Evidence as
well as on Focus Today, Hebrew Nation Radio and more.

(01:29):
And now she's here with us. Get ready. This is
not your typical religious conversation, you guys. This is a
deep dive into history, scripture, and uncomfortable but necessary questions
before we dive in with today's episode and bringing on Judell,
I do want to take a moment to welcome each

(01:50):
and every last one of you and extend an open
invitation for you to come back again and again. And
if you have not subscribed to the show, please hit
that subscribe button. That way you won't miss an episode once.
I a blow to show. If you really enjoy these talks,
please be sure to share with family members and friends,
and please head on over to leave us a review

(02:12):
as well. You guys, thank you again for joining us
today on Authentic Talks two point zero. Now let's go
ahead and get real and dive on in. You guys,
Let's get authentic with Jodel on Stut. Authentic Talks is
all about authentic conversations. This show is all about growth, love, respect, success, mind,

(02:34):
body and spirit. If you're looking to grow and become
your authentic self, then this is the podcast for you
and I am your host Chante. Welcome to the show. Hi, Jodell,
Welcome to Authentic Talks two point oh. I'm excited to
have you here today. Before we dive in, can I

(02:57):
have you introduce yourself to our listeners? Please?

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Sure? It is so fun to be here. I'm looking
forward to our conversation. I am Jodel Enstatt. I have
about thirty years into biblical research in history, and I
love the pursuit of truth and finding and discovering new things.
But more than that, something that benefits society and provides

(03:23):
unity to us and hopefully not just as Americans, but
other nations as well. I think our world could use
a little bit of that.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Welcome to the show again.
I'm glad that you're here because when I've read your book,
the fact that you have a new book out, I
was very interested in talking with you. I wanted to
know so many things that I had to just breathe.
I had a lot of questions. I love that you
study truth, being a truth seeker. How far back does

(03:52):
the research go? Is it like fifteen hundreds or where
does it start? When you are looking at when it's
a bit biblical what is it called a biblical scholar? Yes,
for me.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
This is my second book. My second book is Does
Jesus Exist? My first book was Yawe Exists, and this
is all part of the Yawe Exists series, and that
one I went all the way back to the idea
of the creation the flood and proceeded forward. The real
history really begins with Abraham around twenty one hundred BCE,

(04:30):
and then with the Exodus, which I date very early,
which is around fifteen fifty BCE, and that happens to
coincide with the Hicksos explosion out of Egypt, and there's
lots of archaeological evidence. It's so funny because when you
get into the discussion atheists, one of the things that
they always use to support their position there's no evidence

(04:53):
for the Exodus. Well yeah, if you're looking in the
wrong time period, there is not. But if you're looking
at the earlier time period, all the evidence is there.
It becomes really fun I call my method of scholarship
by Sherlock Holmes method, where I am looking for those details,

(05:15):
and those details can make everything fall in place and
give it history and context.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
I just love that when you were growing up, you
took an interest in the Bible and it made you
want to dig. How does someone become a biblical scholar?

Speaker 2 (05:31):
So when I was a kid at church, we would
have Biblical archaeological review in our four year I was
always picking it up, always looking at it, always fascinated
with it. I was going to school for pre law,
so that didn't take me in that direction. But then
I began having questions, especially as I got into motherhood,

(05:53):
I began having questions with the faith that I inherited
because I began to see a lot of contradictions. Those
contradictions were not comfortable because I felt like if I
gave those issues and those controversies, if I acknowledge them,
that somehow my faith would be unpinned, somehow I would

(06:17):
end up in left field. I'd throw everything out and
I wouldn't believe in anything. And as I kept digging,
I did go through a couple years of struggling with
you know, am I atheist? Am I not? But as
I couldn't let go, tried to walk away, I couldn't
it because the information is so solid, it's there, And

(06:38):
as I kept studying, I'm like, oh my goodness, there's
a foundation here. It's a foundation for humanity. We can't
ignore this. So it really came to life. In my
first book, I put God on trial and I asked
specific questions. It really boils down to is God righteous?
Because you can have a God, but if he's not

(06:58):
a righteous God, it kind of all falls apart. You know,
when you look at all of the pagan deities, they
acknowledged God's but they were far from righteous. They got
up on the wrong side of the bed, but wipe
out twenty thousand people.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
So some of your questions that you haven't didn't quite
make sense that led you into your research, if you
don't mind me asking, sure.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
There were a lot of them. One of them was
did Jesus uphold divine law? So at Mount c and I,
God gives Moses a law that he says is a
way of life. Ezekiel thirty three, verse fifteen says, walk
in my statutes of life. So there's the idea that

(07:42):
when not just a small group of people, but when
humanity walks in that way of life, life becomes self perpetuating.
My first question was did Jesus uphold divine law? I
was really surprised that in many verses he does. It's
like everybody thinks the law is nailed to the cross.
They want to take this arbitrary look at the law

(08:02):
and say it's just kind of rigid rules aren't really
good for humanity. But there's lots of verses in the
New Testament Versus Corinthians nine to nine, for instance, that
talk about the law being good for humanity and being beneficial.
So if this law is so good, why do we
do away with it? Why do we think that it's
no longer relevant? And when I look around today, what

(08:26):
do we see? Everybody has a different definition of right
and wrong. Now you have professors, you have people in
universities teaching our kids that stealing is okay if you
want to just go take it, it's okay to kill. Yeah,
these are major like Harvard University, UCLA, major universities where

(08:48):
these professors are teaching these ideas.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
And what context of speaking are they saying We're at
the end of the world. You know how they show
those programs where they're like, for one day, the people
get to go out and they are stealing and robbing.
I forgot the name of it, but it's a movie
that has like three different it's a series where it's
part one, part two, part three.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
What was it called Hunger Games?

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Maybe No, it's a not Hunger Games. It's another one
where people are locked down for that one day and
they're afraid that people are coming in. I don't remember
the name of it, but it sure does make you think,
what would I do if we had that happen in
real life? How will we protect our goods in our house?
Will we board ourselves all in? I'm wondering if they

(09:34):
were thinking about the movie and it was a hypothetical
or something, because that just seems so like totally lacking
integrity to teach something like that on a college level.
You know that it's okay to go out and steal
and just take whatever you want, like that doesn't even
it sounds horrible, but.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
You find one of the tactics that are used is
undermining a strong identity. I find in religion many times
you are taught that you can never be righteous no
matter what you do, you can never be good enough.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Which makes the same hopeless.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
No matter how much you try, you can never get
on God's good side, or what you do will never
be good enough in his sight. So why bother?

Speaker 1 (10:20):
But yet I made you in the image and likeliness
of Me, So that means like, if I'm made in
an image and likeliness of God, that would mean that
I could. I guess that's like just with legs and
having the ability to have a brain. There's so much
you know like that I want to ask you that
my brain is just racing all over the place, so

(10:42):
you I can't get to the big question yet because
we just started the show. You guys have to buy
the book to find out. But I'm gonna get you
some information where we'll no. So when you were doing
your research, you said that at some point in book
one you kind of was like, I don't know, but

(11:03):
then you did go back on the side of like, okay,
all the evidence points to truth. What do you think
about the rumors that we've heard that so much of
the Bible is missing and that it is super contradictory.
Did you find that that was true?

Speaker 2 (11:19):
So let me start with The Old Testament is also
called the tanuk, the Jewish term. What I find within
the Old Testament, there is a lot of cogency. There's
not contradiction what a lot of times people perceive as
contradiction is just the hierarchy of laws. For instance, judgment
is going to be ruled by a higher level of laws.

(11:43):
You have commandments, statutes, judgments, laws, and commands, and they
all have different functions. You wouldn't take a constitutional law
necessarily and apply it in a courtroom, although those constitutional
ideas govern the laws of the court room, if that
makes sense. So you see a lot of that in

(12:03):
the Old Testament. You see a lot of self fulfillment
in history. A lot of the prophecies in the Old
Testament were fulfilled with Assyria and Babylon. The one prophecy
that has not been fulfilled, and there's like sixty of
these prophecies, is that God will take all of Israel
their modern day descendants, and will one day, through this

(12:26):
divine exodus, restore them back to the land. That prophecy
is sixty times mentioned in the Old Testament. So there
you don't find so much contradiction. But when you get
to the New Testament, there is a lot of tension
between the core foundational ideas in the Old Testament versus

(12:48):
the New Testament. And that is what I really struggled with,
because when I saw that everything was consistent here and
I could build a very firm foundation. I saw that
was right, it was good, it made sense, it was balanced.
Then over here I'm not going, okay, does this fit?
And that's where I really struggle.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
I used to love reading the New Testament and embracing
it more than I did the Old Testament. And I
think what it was is I just absolutely loved the
book of Matthew, Mark and John. I love when they
talked about, you know, I go to prepare a place
for you in my father's house. There's many mansions, and
it was like all of the areas in the Bible

(13:32):
where Jesus was actually here and spoke, and it was
more about his presence. I found that I enjoyed understanding
what they said was the beginning of the Book of
Genesis and how on day one this was made, let
there be light and all the different things, and how
every day there was something, and on the seventh day
there was rest. But then once we get into the

(13:54):
other books, it starts to I would find that for me,
I had a really hard time of my attention. I
could keep up. I was like, wait a minute, where
did the other people come from? I was so caught
up on those details that I found myself as a
like eleven year old girl and a fifteen year old girl,

(14:15):
frustrated that no one could answer the questions for me.
When Cain slain Abel, you know, he'lled the other one
and then he was allowed to wonder in the world
for the whole rest of his days. How did he
end up with a wife and kids? Because I think
like later on it talks about him having a family,

(14:36):
and I was like, how is that possible if in
the Garden of Eve they were the only ones? It
was Adam and Eve. And I was really caught up
so much on the story that it it ruined it
for me to where I was like, I just don't
even and no one ever can answer me. So I
just moved on and went to the New Testament and

(14:57):
embraced it. And I loved the Book of Proverbs because
I thought, regardless of if you're a believer in it
or not, that it was great wisdom that anyone could
really use and benefit from. And so that's what I
had did for some years, where the New Testament was
like my thing, and I was like, oh, it makes
me feel so warm and fuzzy. And then the stories.

(15:19):
But I am today not a very religious person because
I find that there is a lot of dogma. I
just had to share with you my experience where I
would be like, oh, I'm so fliffy, and I just
had all of this hope in it and a lot
of unanswered questions, and it was just not considered as
respectful or welcomed to question, to have the kind of

(15:46):
questions that I had. There was no safe space for that.
It was almost like this feeling of you're going to
go to hell because you're asking those types of questions.
Mine had got pretty deep where I was wanting to
know the details.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
So I have friends that I call that the left
Buddha Fellowship. Welcome to the church, but leave your questions
at the door. Yeah, And I'm very blessed that I
have met a lot of people along this journey and
they have questions too. They ask hard, difficult questions.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Are they're allowed to ask them?

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Oh? Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Oh nice.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Nothing's off limits. Now if it's devious, well that's off limits.
But you know it's a very broad open as long
as we're sticking with the evidence, then you know, we
want to know truth. How are you going to know
if you don't ask. At one point in time, the
Catholic Church had a monopoly on all the discussions, and

(16:46):
if you ask questions, you wouldn't just be kicked out
of the church, you could be burned at the stake.
You know, you look at Galileo, you look at all
the very early a strangers. They had it very rough,
but they paved the way for us today. So we
can question. And Thomas Kahn, you know, in his book

(17:10):
The Theory of Cybentipic Revolutions, you know, he talks about how,
you know, oftentimes it's not new evidence that you find,
but it's new questions and new discussions being applied to
that evidence, where all of a sudden you have this revolution.
Whether it's technology industry or something like that, it's just

(17:34):
comes from asking the right questions.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Questions were welcome.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Well, we were a bunch of black sheep. We never
really fit in anywhere because we ask questions. We kind
of left our organized religion because it wasn't satisfying us.
It was an organization meant to support an organization. Once
you put a name to yourself, it's really hard to
change that. What happens if you have new truth One

(18:04):
of the prophecies that we have in Isaiah and Daniel
is that in the latter days, the lies we've inherited.
That's I think Jeremiah ninety nine, the lies we've inherited
from our forefathers. All of a sudden we'll see those lies,
will challenge them, and we'll let go of them, will
actually come back to God, will embrace truth. But it's

(18:28):
this original, pure nugget. You know that Abraham had that,
Moses had that has been corrupted by man. God gave truth.
But then, and this is my I am a very
very big proponent of divine law. I also have some
YouTube teachings and discussions on it. I show how the

(18:49):
law of Moses is totally different than the Hamarabi code.
It's different than the Heurrian laws, It's different from the
lip ishtar code, it's different from all the ancient laws.
Codes and law codes are important because they set the
standard of morality. Lacke establishes right and wrong for society.
It's not this you know, generic black and white, these

(19:12):
shades of you know, gray, where it's like, you know,
I can get away with this, but it makes it
so everybody is on the same page and you can
have amazing unity. You mentioned the Sabbath. The thing about
the Sabbath and what I see in society, especially our
fast paced world where everybody has to work. The economy

(19:36):
isn't doing so well. So everybody's working. I know people
working two and three jobs. They work seven days a week,
three hundred and sixty days a year. They may take
a few days off. But we really have made slaves
of ourselves. We have put ourselves is self inflicted. The
socio economic system has created this, but we have also

(19:59):
participate paid it in that when you look at the Sabbath,
it's a day where you get to pause, reflect, rejuvenate.
You get to say, what did I do well last week?
What do I want to improve on? I mean, it's
just so amazing to have to catch your breath, to
catch your breath, have that divine rhythm, and to you know,

(20:21):
have that day reflect on God. Spend with your family.
You know, our families are falling apart because we don't
spend enough time.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
How does faith, evidence, and the modern believer, all of
these things collectively go together. What would be important for
the modern Christians and Jews to revisit about some of
the foundational questions with open minds and scholarly honesty, like

(20:52):
where you're finding things that may not be what everyone
thought it to be. How do they bring in the
faith and the evidence and keep doing research without losing
their you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (21:14):
So I think our teachers, our pastors, our priests, they
have really taught us that if we question, that, if
we ask hard questions, we will lose our faith. Yes,
I can say in my personal journey, yes, I did
come through that because I did have to ask very
hard questions and there were no teachers. There's nobody like

(21:37):
me out there. In many ways, I felt like a pioneer.
I had other friends that were on that caravan with me,
so it wasn't just me. But we asked hard questions
and we didn't give up. We kept seeking. One of
the promises that you find in Deuteronomy chapter four is
that if you seek me, you will find me. That
is one of God's promises. I found that to be

(21:59):
true when I first began this was back. Okay, I
guess I'll give a date nineteen ninety nine. You know,
early two thousand and four I did put God on trial.
I said, is he righteous? Is there evidence. I started
with archaeology ancient Israel, and I found that every story

(22:21):
that the Bible tells through the Judges era, King David
and the monarchy, not only do we have archaeological evidence
supporting that, some of it down to the very year
for the present archaeological dating done by scholarship, but you
also have epigraphic meaning written records from ancient Assyria, and

(22:44):
they will tell a similar story from another perspective of
a story that we have in the Bible, but it
confirms that the event occurred. That right there was huge.
I also did chronology. The chronology biblical chrinology has what
I found, we're only three errors, but the rest of

(23:05):
about sixty points of interaction are sixty different. You know,
this king ringed after that king, ascension dates and all
of that, they're perfect. So when you have three errors
out of sixty, that's not bad at all, very good accuracy.
But then when it came to divine law, I had questions.
There's protocols for health not to eat unclean meats for instance, pork, shellfish,

(23:32):
All of those things are forbidden. So I said, okay,
is God just saying do this? Because who just wants
us to be different or is there something to it?
So I dug into the research and I found that
every single time, unclean meats have higher rates of toxicity,
they have higher rates of parasitic If you eat those meats,

(23:55):
you're actually eating parasites. And now what we're learning is
that cancers and other diseases are actually caused by parasites.
Sometimes you can't even see them. And so every time
I research, I found God said, don't do this, and
this is bad for us. Then there's also prohibitions about

(24:19):
having intercourse during a woman's period. I found, mainly from
Islamic scholarship, that women who have intercourse during menss have
higher rates of ovarian cancer, they have higher rates of endometriosis.
Circumcised men have much better health. They have lower rates

(24:40):
of STDs, lower rates of HUEP. They also have lower
rates of penile cancers. Their female partners also have an
eight fold decrease in cervical and ovarian cancers. And that
study came off of a study concluded in twenty fourteen.

(25:00):
It was done on seven continents, It spanned something like
two hundred countries. It didn't matter your race, your ethnicity,
your religious creed. If you were circum If a man
was circumcised every single time, there was better health.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
A twenty sixteen John Hopkins study came out just based
on data inside the United States with a growing trend
to no longer circumcise our male children. They found it
was costing sixteen billion dollars in healthcare related expenses. Wow,

(25:40):
that's a lot of money I sent on disease care
for something that could be totally preventable. So as I
went through the law, I began to see, Oh my goodness,
this thing is real. Nobody would have known not to
eat poork, nobody would not to eat shellfish. No guy
is going to think about cutting off you know that

(26:01):
little skit, And trust me, no guy's going to come
up with that. So it shows the hand of God
and there's reason for it. With male circumcision. It isn't
just being circumcised. He says to do it on the
eighth day, and that eighth day the babies have a
higher rate of pro throngbin and also of vitamin K,

(26:25):
which are essential in blood clotting. So you know, if
you're going to cut that off, the baby has the
mechanisms to deal with that. So that there's no health
at risks. So I was just really blown away. And
there's another promise in Exodus fifteen, verse twenty four. It says,
if you are a faithful and just to keep all

(26:45):
of the statutes and judgments that I put before you
this day, I will put none of these diseases upon
you that I put upon the Egyptians. So me, being
the inquiring person that I am, I asked, what does
diseases do the ancient Egyptians have? So thankfully modernly we

(27:06):
have MRI scans, we have tissue scans that have been
run through DNA analysis, modern technology. And guess what the
number one disease was in ancient Egypt?

Speaker 1 (27:19):
What was that?

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Heart disease, cardiobasquar diseases. Guess what the number one disease
today is?

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Is it heart disease?

Speaker 2 (27:28):
It is art wow yep, cancer, osteomylitis, osteoporosis. All the
things we deal with today are evidenced in ancient Egypt.
These studies are really only good for about thirty years
because Jews stopped practicing a lot of the Torah. The
Torah is the first five books where the divine law

(27:51):
is laid down for about a thirty year period. You
could do research on Jews at Mount Sinai Medical Center
in New York, and every single time you've researched it
and no matter the study, they were always healthier, They
had fewer rates of cancer. Everything that doesn't hold true

(28:13):
today because our food supply is very contaminated with chemicals.
There's been a really big movement in Judaism not to
obey divine law, just kind of follow the rabbi like
traditional Christianity will do that with Jesus or a pastor
get your emotional high or whatever it is you need
for the week, your motivational talk like zig Ziggler, but

(28:37):
there's never any meat behind it. At some point it
ends up being very empty because it's founded on words
that don't really better your life and provide deeper meaning
and a better outcome.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Did you find them in all the different cultures that
the story repeated itself, but it was just being advanced.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
So there's been many books written on the Jesus story,
and you find that it comes in many different flavors.
He's often seen as he well, he's always a son
of God. And so here's a tadbit that blew me away,
and this was my final lynch pin. The question I

(29:21):
had to answer before I could go. You know, does
this fit with the Old Testament or not? And that
is when nebicad Nezar says that there are four men
in the fiery furnace and the fourth is like the
son of God. Who do Christians think.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
That this Jesus?

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Do we have any evidence that nebeicad Nezar accepted Israel's religion?

Speaker 1 (29:49):
No, I don't think we do.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
So the king of Babylon was a high priest in
the Babylonian religion pagan religion, he would have embraced his
own nation's theology. In Babylonian theology, Tamus was a savior,
deity and son of God. So when he says the

(30:11):
fourth is like the son of God, there's no reference
to Jesus. He's referring to Tamus. And the New Testament
has contradictions that challenged me because in the Old Testament
we find that God is a righteous judge. He distinguishes
between the righteous and the unrighteous. He gives, he rewards

(30:33):
the righteous with prosperity, blessings, good health, and conversely, the
wicked are are judge they face hardship, or if their
crimes are heinous enough, they're going to be put to death.
Deuteronomy twenty eight Levedicus twenty six really go through that,
and they're called caustic laws, where it's an if, then

(30:56):
if you do this, this will be your outcome. But
if you don't do that, that will be our coming.
You know, we as parents often do that if you
get into drugs and alcohol, you're going to have a
hard life. God does the same thing with us, because
everything he tells us to avoid are things that are
harmful to us. When you follow divine law, it naturally
brings about the promises that are there. But this idea

(31:20):
of God as judge is where God separates the righteous
and the wicked. He judges justly. But what I struggled
with in the New Testament is that all of a
sudden he becomes this God where there is no separation.
He rains fire and brimstone down equally upon the righteous

(31:40):
and the unrighteous. There's no separation, And my question is
that a righteous God? So that was one of the
big issues that I struggled with in my journey, and
through all the evidence that I've considered.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
I don't think I can ask the question does Jesus exist?
Because with that ruined the whole experience of reading the book.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
I can tell you this. I do provide a lot
of archaeological evidence, historical evidence, things that other scholars like
bart Erman, he is the top, hands down top scholar
on New Testament studies. I cover some evidence that is
controversial that neither atheists nor Christians like to cover because

(32:29):
it's controversial evidence, but it shows very much that Jesus
very likely was a historical person. The question really becomes
was he man? Was he God? And what was his purpose?
I do leave a big cliffhanger at the end of
the book, something that I just leave it where my

(32:51):
journey was at that particular time. How do you have
Jeremiah when he condemns human sacrifice and he says, of God,
I never thought of it. It never even came to
my mind. So how do you have a God who
says that human sacrifice never came into his mind? And

(33:13):
then we have a whole religion based on human sacrifice
where God sacrifices his son, an innocent son, for the
sins of others. That really troubled me because that's a
total contradiction and the very foundation of an entire belief system.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
I personally think that there's a well, what I believe
is not why we're here right now, you know. I
do actually believe that Jesus was a real person that
was here. I could not wrap my brain around the
sacrifice of my own child because I'm a mother, but
it was always like explaining so that we could have

(33:57):
everlasting life. There's a lot of things that don't really
make sense to me, but you just go with the
flow and those are your secret thoughts, so to speak.
But I do think that spirituality and religion are two
different things to me, and I feel like there's sometimes

(34:20):
a lot of dogma. But I love the fact that
you are a scholar because it means you present facts
to support the outcomes in your books, and I think
that's an amazing thing. Most of us are out here
going on what we just believe, and so you're presenting
facts as to whether or not something is a yay

(34:42):
or a name. I've heard stories about how it's the
same story that's being told in the Bible, but the
characters change. When you go back really far. It's like
the same story but just different names.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
We for instance, we have the flood is in almost
every culture from Assyria, India, China, and even South America.
So the question becomes, and I really find that there
is a dividing line in one's belief. You're either going
to believe that the whole world had truth at one

(35:22):
point in time there really was a historical event that
everybody recorded. Names are always going to be different because
languages are different, right, you know, we call it cognates.
So when you have a word that sounds similar today,
shampoo is shampoo in English, but in France it's shampoo,

(35:46):
So those are cognate. They sound very very much alike.
And in the Bible we have a lot of cognates
where they have similar sounds, similar meanings. In early literature,
these stories are there, even the garden is there. So
the question becomes, and this is the dividing line. Do
you see that the whole world at one time had truth?

(36:07):
These are real life histories, the pagan ones art mixed
with a lot of mythology, where you don't find that
in the Hebrew Texas, even though there's a myth with it,
the core history is that there or do you think
there was no truth whatsoever until God revealed it to

(36:27):
Abraham or Moses. And your answer to that question really
determines whether you're going to eventually become an agnostic or
an atheist, because there is even similarity with the Mosaic
law and some points of the Hamarabi code, like the
Italian laws. You know, I for eye, tooth for a tooth,

(36:49):
And today people will take a rigid understanding of that.
It's like, hey, I gotta go chop off an arm.
But what that really meant was that the punishment should
fit the crime, and it shouldn't be excessive, being in
too much, but it shouldn't be too LENI an exit.
It makes a lot more sense.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yes, I have to ask you talk about seven universal
precepts of truth? Can you briefly outline them and their
significance and unco uncovering spiritual deception? Is that like a
duplicate question you would say, or.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
So? Six of these are universal to every field of study,
whether it's medicine, science, cosmology, geology, they are the same.
So the very first idea, the very first precept, is
that it is constant. In other words, it's going to
be the same yesterday, and the same tomorrow. For instance,

(37:48):
when we look at Newton's third law, for every action,
there's an opposite and equal reaction. That's a law of
physics because every time we tried experiments we get the
same results and the same thing with truth when God
says it in Genesis and excess Leviticus numbers. When he
says something, it's constant, it does not change. There's not

(38:13):
contradiction to it. And later on when there is contradiction
to it, that should put our antenna up and go,
wait a minute, is this person speaking truth or are
they not? This possess in the driver's seat, it enables
us to direct our own paths wisely and not be
led astray, and not be deceived. The second one is fidelity,

(38:36):
is the fact that even in the details you're going
to have, you're going to have that constancy. One of
the examples I give is that when God curses came
after the garden of Eden, he says, have trouble producing

(38:57):
food off the land.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
We froze a little bit. So you said that he
would have trouble producing fruit off the land.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yes, that was a curse against Kane. The grand found
itself was cursed. But when you go to Israel's curses,
that curse is never repeated. It's totally different. The other
thing that you find is faithfulness. One of the definitions
that it gives of God is that he is a
faithful God. If he gives a promise for us to

(39:34):
wrap our minds around today because we're not used to
their own hurt, you know, keeping their words so strongly.
But that is what God does. He keeps his own word.
He doesn't go back on it. If he made a promise,
that promise stays. Even if a group of people like
Asient Israel, rebelt against God's word, his word still stands.

(39:56):
You know. You find that Moses's sin and strike the
rock instead of talking to it like God told him to.
God had said, I'll give Israel water if you go
talk to the rock. Well, Moses sinned and he struck
the rock, but God still gave Israel water. Moses's sin
did not prevent Jehovah from fulfilling his promise. The same

(40:21):
thing with a Judean prophet who didn't obey God, even
though he spoke in God's name and said this is
what's going to happen. Even though that Judean prophet later
disobeyed what he spoke in God's name still came to pass.
So that idea of constancy, faithfulness, fidelity. The other one
is righteousness. Righteousness is acting according to divine law. This

(40:47):
is really important because most people have the idea of
a God who is not bound by anything. God can
do whatever he wants. He's the emperor. If he doesn't
like john he can just take Johnny out. If he
doesn't like your family, what you're wearing, or what you did,
I can do whatever he wants. He's the king. But

(41:08):
that's not what we find in the Hebrew text. There
we find a God that is confined to obey his
own law that limits what he can do. He can't
go kill an unrighteous person. If you ran a red
light and nobody saw you, he's not going to come
after you and give you a penalty that far exceeds
your crime. The idea that God is only righteous because

(41:33):
he is a god without iniquity, and that he is
righteous because he obeys that law is a really key understanding.
The other thing is that righteousness is not arbitrary. We
have this idea of this arbitrary God that is not
bound to any rule of law. We almost see God
like Stalin or Hill or in many ways, we kind

(41:56):
of make God the creator into the devil and the
ways that we think about him.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
I think that came about for some people because they
were saying that God actually wiped out the most number
of people per the Bible. I don't know if they
said it was two million people. There was a massive
amount of people. My level of understanding isn't even as
high as your studies. I'm still in the peon stage

(42:23):
of like, well this the little tiny things that don't
make sense, that probably don't really even matter, because you
know what.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
I'm matter, they do, they do. Let's go back to
what you said about God wiping out people. When we
look at Leviticus eighteen, it states that God did drive
the canaan ice out of the land because they were marrying,
they were committing homosexual acts. They were, you know, marrying,

(42:53):
they're very close relatives. They were, it says, perverting the land,
and it says, when the land becomes perverse, I will
spew them out. We also know that in early history
they were partaking in human sacrifice, something that is an
abomination to God. So you find that these nations. If

(43:14):
you look at Genesis fifteen, I believe it's verse sixteen
when God makes the Promised Land covenant with Abraham. He says,
I am going to give you the land of the Amorites,
but I can't do it right now because the sins
of the Amorites have not yet come to the full.

(43:34):
So there's this idea that God can't act during Ibraham's lifetime,
he can't act in his sons or grandson's lifetime because
he knows it's going to take longer for them to
reach this point of degradation to where society is so
wicked that the land can't bear it anymore. And the
story of Lot, the messengers that come to Law, is

(43:57):
a good example of the wickedness of the land. Couldn't
even come to the city without them being threatened with
murder or whatever else the story implies.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
It feels like we're almost there now. Sometimes when I
turn on the television, it is so depressing you hear
about all this. It's so much going on. Ever since
I was a young girl, I would hear we're coming
to judgment day. They would talk about things like that,
and I would sit and go wow. If I were
like the father. I don't know that I could have

(44:29):
that much patience to allow it to continue. So you
could see how when they reached a certain point of
self destruction, that's where they were heading. The flood was
to give a clean start, per the story, right, and
all of the other things were to give it a
fresh start. But it seems like we're in a situation

(44:51):
where there's just a lot going on. What do you
say to the people who were constantly suffering on repeat?
You say, hey, well you chose this life. This is
the soul that you chose to come in as. And
you hear those things and it's like, what was I
guess they're supposed to be learning to get to the
next level in their lifetime. But I do believe that

(45:12):
there's something very I feel like we're not here alone,
you know what I'm saying. So I am not an atheist.
I believe that there is definitely a higher source, the Creator,
and people can call it or refer to it as
what they feel most comfortable. Some people say yahweh, some
people say God, some people say Lord, some people say Christ.

(45:38):
And they use a lot of different names for the
same energy source which is supposed to be an energy
of love. I do believe that there's something because I
can feel it.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Well. God says that he breathed life into us, and
that life is energy, definitely, especially when we are doing
what's right. God says that he won't hear us when
we depart from his ways, but when we seek him,
we'll find him. We can be connected. One of the

(46:16):
reasons why I gravitate so much to the idea of
law solidifying our connection with God is because there's so
many promises that if we walk in his ways we'll
have that relationship. Deuteronomy four six through eight says that
He gave us all of his laws so that we

(46:37):
would be a group of people where no nation on
earth had a close relationship with Him as what we
would to me. It just says it all. If you
follow this pattern, in this path of life, you will
have a closer relationship with me. No nation will have
justice and righteousness as you will, and you'll be my peaceop.

(47:00):
I just find that it is so comforting, so meaningful.
You know, we go around our lives and everybody is
searching for meaning and they're not finding it right undermining
their identity. They're trying to change who they are. Nobody
is proud of their heritage. It's like, no embrace it.

(47:21):
God has made each of us the way we are
for a purpose. We all have something to contribute. God
is the God of everybody, but he has revealed one
way to live, universal for all humanity. It takes away
the contradiction because when I look at Christianity, there's three

(47:43):
hundred and fifty thousand different sects of Christianity, seven major
sects of Judaism. Far more than that when you get
into it, because everybody has a different opinion. I found
that everybody creates God in their own image. Rather than

(48:04):
God revealing to us, we are defining who God is
for ourselves. It's a very humanistic approach where we say
this is who you are going to be, this is
a God I'm going to worship. And when I looked
at those three hundred and fifty thousand different sects of
Christianity and Judaism, they can't all be right. And I

(48:27):
love truth. I am a truth seeker. So my question
is how do we cut through that? How do we
find if God hasn't lied to us, if God hasn't
said to seek him in vain? Where truth is unknowable,
Then how do we discover him, the real him, not
the one that we create? How do we find the

(48:49):
real thing where there isn't my version of him and
your version of him? And I found that when we
return to that law code, it really has that way
of life that just and even in the Hebrewscriptures it
talks about that way of life being a path of
eternal life. That was something I was never taught growing up. Yeah,

(49:13):
and so I just find it so full of hope,
such full unity, you know, teachings like don't defraud your brother,
and the idea that you don't commit adultery. There's just
so many layers there that are easy, very very easy.
When you look at Dudoonmi thirty verses eleven through sixteen,

(49:35):
it says, this way is not too hard for you.
It's very easy. It's in your mouth and in your
heart that you can do it right. And then that's
followed by I've set before you life and death, blessing
and cursing. Choose life. And that's where I think we
all are today. Choose life. We all inherit something different.
But I think the tools are there for us to

(49:57):
find God and to have that better way of life.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
If for someone who was interested in buying the book,
you mentioned it earlier, and I'm bringing us back to
that place, like what they can find in the book,
And the title of the book is does Jesus exist,
the quest for biblical truth and the suffering servant in

(50:23):
our modern world? What is it that they're going to
find in this book? And is this book only for
someone who is a believer or is it specific to
a certain audience.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
It's really for anybody who wants truth. If you have
a heart for truth, if you love justice, you love righteousness,
and especially if something just feels off. The contradictions of religion,
you know you have Baptists, Episcopalians, Catholics, if those sects
of religion, and why are we there? And how can

(51:00):
we heal those divides? If you wrestle with any of
those questions, If you've ever wondered about Jesus, who is
the how did he fit into the bigger picture? Or
contradictions with the New Testament and the Old Testament. All
of these things are things that I share that were
part of my journey and will totally resonate with the reader.

(51:22):
I hope that it will bring peace and take away
some of the things, you know, those ideologies, those questions
that we struggle with, and provide a very firm foundation
to renew your faith.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
I love that share is that what you would hope
the readers would take away is that it would renew
their faith if there were someone that was on the fence, and.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
So it would renew their faith. But I think at
the same time reform their faith, because if you just
stay stagnant, if you just stay in that status quo,
you're not going to grow. If you think of a
workout program, if you just do that same workout program,
hitting the same weights with the same intensity, first of all,

(52:13):
you're going to start breaking and wearing down your cartilage
and some of your joints. I think we do that
in our spiritual life because we don't realize that parts
of our faith are breaking, parts of our belief system
are becoming unpinned, until it's too late and there's that
crashing crisis where if your faith, if it's built on lies,

(52:37):
if it's built on faulty premise, and you question it
and you adjust that workout routine to where you're hitting
new machines, you're doing new things you're considering new evidence.
All of a sudden, you're going to get gains. You're
going to grow in a way that was umaginable. Anytime

(52:58):
you change your intensity, anytime that you pick up and
do new muscle groups, there's going to be a little
bit of pain with that. You know the old say
no pain, no gain. But at the end, the reward
pays off one hundredfold. Nothing can compare to the feeling
that you get, the stability that you have, the strength

(53:20):
that you have from asking those hard, difficult questions and
finding the answers, finding a res resolution that is righteous,
just and fits the evidence.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
So you give people permission to ask questions and read
the book. This is a great book, and so the
name of the first book. Both of the books, they
can find them on where can they find them.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
They can find the first book on Amazon, that's yahweh Exists?
Volume one. The second book, Does Jesus Exist? It's on Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, just about any book distributor. You can
find it all over the world on every book selling platform.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
This is a big question. Does Jesus exists? And I
know that if I were in a bookstore and I
seen the title of the book. I would definitely pick
it up because I would I'm like, I want to know,
what do you think? What did your studies reveal? How
did you connect all the dots for whatever the outcome was,

(54:25):
all the information in between to get to that question.
This is definitely a book that is going to be
a great read for everyone. A lot of people have
probably had that question but never had the courage to ask.
Many people are walking around in fear of I'm afraid
to even challenge anything, regardless of the outcome. You know, so,

(54:49):
thank you so much for having the courage to investigate,
to ask questions, and to more importantly, want the answers
and to share them with all of us us. I
love that.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Thank you so much. I have enjoyed our conversation.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
I've enjoyed talking with you as well. What would you
like to leave our listeners with before we end our
episode and is there anything that we have not talked
about that you feel is important to add into the conversation.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
When you read does Jesus Exist? It does leave with
a little bit of a cliffhanger. I am following up
with a three part series on the Suffering Servant of
Isaiah fifty three and digging deep, covering information that has
never been published before, sticking straight with the text. You know,

(55:44):
my platform is very much a sola scriptorra, so we
when we stick with that text, we can't be led
astray by man. And whether it's a pastor wanting to
make money off of you or an organization and wanting
to make money off of you. But when we look
at our world today, we're in a crisis. I don't

(56:07):
think we realize that the source of our crisis is
a crisis of ideology. The violence that we see, the rhetoric,
whether it is religious or political. It all comes down
to the fact that each of us have conflicting religious
ideas that we hold onto. So the only way to

(56:29):
ease that is to find a path where there is
unity that can transcend all of that, assuay the objections
with evidence that gives peace, instills righteousness, and provides a
better way of life where there's health, prosperity, and brotherly love.
I hope that you will find that in the pages

(56:52):
of research and all the evidence that's presented.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
I love it. Thank you so much for sharing. The
title of the book is does Jesus Exist? The Quest
for Biblical Truth and suffering servant in our modern world.
This book is available where all books are sold and
also on Amazon. All of the information is in the
show notes. You can connect with Jodel and definitely check

(57:21):
out the book and books. You guys always say this
on almost every episode. They make the absolute best gifts
and books are still amazing to hold. I feel like
once you give someone their first couple of books, it
inspires them to start their own mini library. I was
nineteen and I didn't have much in the way of

(57:43):
financial overflow where I could afford to buy a ton
of books. But I love reading so much that I
didn't really have a lot of furniture. But I had
a little mini bookshelf that went to around my waist
or a little bit lower than that. It had only
one shelf in the so you could put something cute
on top. You had the one shelf in the middle

(58:05):
and the one at the bottom. And I was excited
when I would get a book that was a gift.
It was something that I never told anyone that I wanted,
but when someone would give me one, I would just
be so excited. I know recently, someone gifted me with
the book, and I was like, yay, like a big kid,
you know. So help someone start their bookshelf in twenty

(58:25):
twenty five, help them get started or help them to
continue to allow it to grow the gift of books.
Thank you so much, Jodom.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
Thank you. I appreciate it. This has been a wonderful
conversation that we've gotten to know each other.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Yes, absolutely, I enjoy talking with you and I look
forward to talking with you again. You have a series
coming out, so you have a platform to come back
again and again.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
You so much, Thank.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
You, thank you, Jodell. I appreciate this offic talk you guys.
If this conversation steered your curiosity, don't stop here. Dive
deeper into the questions that challenge tradition and inspire truth.
Grab your copy of Does Jesus Exist? And explore jodel

(59:17):
on Stat's groundbreaking research for yourself. Share this episode with
someone ready for an authentic conversation about faith history and
what the Bible really says. Authentic talks two point oh
were real stories, real people, and real truth. Meet until
next time, take care of yourselves and each other, and

(59:41):
make sure you stay authentic. Thank you again for tuning in.
I'm chante with authentic talks

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Episode 281 | The Conquest for Biblical Truth | Guest: Jodell Onstott

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 281 | The Conquest for Biblical Truth | Guest: Jodell Onstott