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Squid Game is back, and so is Player 456. In the gripping Season 2 premiere, Player 456 returns with a vengeance, leading a covert manhunt for the Recruiter. Hosts Phil Yu and Kiera Please dive into Gi-hun’s transformation from victim to vigilante, the Recruiter’s twisted philosophy on fairness, and the dark experiments that continue to haunt the Squid Game. Plus, we touch on the new characters, the enduring trauma of old ones, and Phil and Kiera go head-to-head in a game of Ddakjji. Finally, our resident mortician, Lauren Bowser is back to drop more truth bombs on all things death. SPOILER ALERT! Make sure you watch Squid Game Season 2 Episode 1 before listening on. Let the new games begin! IG - @SquidGameNetflix X (f.k.a. Twitter) - @SquidGame Check out more from Phil Yu @angryasianman , Kiera Please @kieraplease and Lauren Bowser @thebitchinmortician on IG Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts . Squid Game: The Official Podcast is produced by Netflix and The Mash-Up Americans.…
313: Does God Believe in Freedom of Speech?
Manage episode 450978002 series 2976909
Contenuto fornito da Rev. Dr. Jason Garwood. Tutti i contenuti dei podcast, inclusi episodi, grafica e descrizioni dei podcast, vengono caricati e forniti direttamente da Rev. Dr. Jason Garwood o dal partner della piattaforma podcast. Se ritieni che qualcuno stia utilizzando la tua opera protetta da copyright senza la tua autorizzazione, puoi seguire la procedura descritta qui https://it.player.fm/legal.
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50 episodi
Manage episode 450978002 series 2976909
Contenuto fornito da Rev. Dr. Jason Garwood. Tutti i contenuti dei podcast, inclusi episodi, grafica e descrizioni dei podcast, vengono caricati e forniti direttamente da Rev. Dr. Jason Garwood o dal partner della piattaforma podcast. Se ritieni che qualcuno stia utilizzando la tua opera protetta da copyright senza la tua autorizzazione, puoi seguire la procedura descritta qui https://it.player.fm/legal.
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1 315: How Does Scripture Address Common Marriage Difficulties? 1:04:36
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Reconstructionist Radio Master Feed
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Reconstructionist Radio Master Feed
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This transcript was auto-generated. If you would like to submit edits, or volunteer to edit more transcripts for us, please reach out . Speaker 1 ( 00:01 ) Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your host is Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor and founder of the Chalcedon Teacher Training Institute. Speaker 2 ( 00:23 ) My guest today on the podcast is Chalcedon President Mark Rushdoony. One of the most difficult shoes to fill are those left by a well-known and well-renowned father. R.J. Rushdoony passed away in February of 2001, having founded and led the Chalcedon Foundation since 1965. He left a legacy of Books, sermons, articles, lectures, and easy chair conversations, which really were the first podcasts, that continue to educate, inspire, and guide a generation of Christians eager to serve and further the Kingdom of God. Thanks for joining me today, Mark. Speaker 1 ( 01:04 ) Good to be here with you, Andrea. Speaker 2 ( 01:06 ) I’m guessing you will be the first to admit that when your dad left Chalcedon in your hands, he didn’t consider your role to be exactly like his was. What guidance did he give you in terms of what he saw as the vision for the future of the ministry? Speaker 1 ( 01:25 ) Well, to understand what he saw as the future of the ministry, you have to understand what he considered important. In his ministry, he considered his writing his legacy. Even his audio recordings, which many people find of great value, he personally did not consider great importance because much of what he spoke ended up as content in his books. He grew up in the era of a scholar was one who was knowledgeable about what had been written, and so he was a lifelong reader. And so his writing was what he considered very important. And so when he passed away, it was obvious that his writings were something that needed to be preserved, and many had not seen the light of day yet. I had a full of manuscripts to publish, and we’re just coming towards the end of some of that. It was his publication that was very important. In the last weeks of his life, he did give me specific instructions on what he wanted to prioritize, such as his articles that he wrote for a farming publication for many years. It was one part of his writing that he had never really organized well, and he wanted me to get those together and get them published. Speaker 1 ( 02:56 ) Those were articles that were in the California Farmer, and we later published a complete collection of those. Speaker 2 ( 03:03 ) That was what we now call a word in season, the volumes of a word in season? Speaker 1 ( 03:08 ) Yes. He considered that some of his best writing because they were brief articles, because he was limited on space in what was going to be in this farming magazine. The column was called the Pastor’s Pulpit. He knew the original publisher, so he wrote for them for some 25 to 30 years. And he never saw his audience. Each article had to be self-contained. So he had to choose his word very carefully. So he particularly mentioned to me that he wanted those collected. Speaker 2 ( 03:40 ) I know from experience working with Chalcedon that when you say that there were manuscripts that hadn’t seen the light of day, there kept appearing things like, Oh, wow, there’s something on this, there’s something on that. I remember reading the three-volume set, Good Morning, Friends, and being astounded that I had never seen that before. Did you know those existed, or was it just something that your dad didn’t consider very important? Speaker 1 ( 04:05 ) I knew he had done a radio program when I was very little. He had done a radio program when he was a pastor in Santa Cruz, California. This is before he founded Chalcedon. He was still a full-time pastor, and he did a local radio program. In most of those, he had written out. I found folders of these. At first, I wasn’t even sure what they were, but they were buried in his library somewhere, but I was able to pull those out. And fortunately, he had kept records, a lot of records, not all well organized, but he kept a lot of records of what he wrote and what he did. And so he had a list of the talks that he had given on this radio program, and I was able to find those talks and cross-reference them to his list and when they were done. And so we were able to publish those radio messages that took place over 60 years ago. Speaker 2 ( 05:03 ) It must have seemed like a scavenger hunt for you, except you didn’t know what you were looking for all the time. Speaker 1 ( 05:08 ) In a lot of ways, yes. I’m amazed at some of the things I’m happy to find. A few manuscripts that have missing parts to them that I still haven’t located, and may never find all of the parts to those missing manuscripts. But for the most part, we’re able to assemble all these things together and publish as much as we’ve been able to. Speaker 2 ( 05:29 ) So Did you say that publishing has remained a major focus for you as President of Chalcedon? Speaker 1 ( 05:36 ) Yes. When my father passed away, before he passed away, it was pretty obvious that he was irreplaceable. I knew that certainly I wasn’t the person to do what he did and to produce what he did and to honor the leadership that he did for Chalcedon and the Christian Reconstruction Movement in general. We couldn’t find anybody that would really serve that role of leadership at Chalcedon. When he passed away, in one sense, it was a daunting task, but in another sense, because of the priority of getting his books in print and those that were out of print, back in print, became a fairly obvious need. In that sense, my role was clearly defined for me. It was pretty obvious what I needed to do and that that was going to take a long time. There were things that Chalcedon produced, like the journals of Christian Reconstruction, which we have digitized. They’re not all available online yet. It’s one of those things that we’re doing as we have time. We’ve not only been publishing his books in print, past books and the manuscripts that we published after his passing, but we’ve also been producing ebooks and most recently, audiobooks. Speaker 1 ( 07:01 ) So we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. And the reason for all this is not just an archive with the sense of the sake of an archive, but the purpose of this is because I think that my father’s influence in the future is going to be more than it has been in the past because he addressed so many things that the church needs to address. The church has largely been resisting much of what my father said, the need even for Christian reconstruction, much less putting this into action. The need for theonomy has been debated by the church, much less actually seeing how we obey God. We’re not going to see a great change in our culture. We’re not going to see a great change in the church and its work until we start addressing some of the things, which is really addressing the fault of the church and the fault of our culture in its post-Christian manifestation. We have to address these issues. He spoke to a lot of these issues. As you know, something interesting about my father’s writing is very, very little of it reads as if it’s dated. Even those references, such as to the Soviet Union, that are obviously dated, he wrote about them in such a way that we can see how applicable it is to the current situation. Speaker 1 ( 08:35 ) It’s actually remarkable the extent to which his writings are very timely today, even those that were written in the ’50s and ’60s. His was really a pioneering work, and it’s been pushed to the side, largely by the 20th century Church and to this date. But I think we’re going to have to address these issues. When we address these issues, I think People are going to have to fall back on some of these ideas. My Father’s Writings are going to be a tremendous resource for the future. That’s why we keep going. It’s not just for the vanity of saying, My Father’s Work endures. You see, Most writers’ works disappear permanently after their passing. Only a few works are considered important enough to be published 30, 40, 50 years after someone’s passing. Then there’s copyright issues. There’s many books that would be interesting to regrant are still copyrighted, and somebody owns that. But there’s no repository of information on where we find the copyright. It’s not like a car. You could find the legal owner of a car through the Department of Motor Vehicles. But when you have a copyright, well, the author, who is the author’s heir? Speaker 1 ( 09:53 ) Often, nobody knows who the author’s heir was or where they are or what family member actually inherited. And so the ownership of authors’ things alone, who has the right to print it again, is very difficult. So we’re keeping all this alive, and we’re keeping his books available because I think these are all issues that he talked about that are going to have to be addressed in the future. Speaker 2 ( 10:21 ) Getting back to immediately after your father’s passing, you just described for us what you considered most important. Did you have to battle with some people’s expectations of you? I mean, you had the same last name. You were a Rushdoony. Did you have to really figure out what God wanted you to do? Because you’re not your dad. You are now President of Chalcedon. As you put it, this isn’t about a museum to your dad. How did you come to decide, Okay, this is the lane I have to be in? Speaker 1 ( 10:56 ) Yes, there were people who thought that we needed to have a person. We needed to have a personality to lead Chalcedon. In fact, I was in a meeting once where after my father’s passing, where the question was aptfully raised, Can anybody think of a Christian organization that has survived its founder’s passing and is still prominent. People had trouble coming up with anything. Most major ministries just disappear with someone’s passing, or they just become entirely different. We didn’t want that to happen. Things like a school will continue because there’s an administrative aspect to a school. There’s an institutional quality to that. There’s not much of an institutional aspect of Chalcedon. It is the work of Christian reconstruction. People saw, and I told everyone, I was not who my father was, and I could not serve that role. Some people wanted us to try to find somebody, maybe even hire somebody, to be the President of Chalcedon, and to fill that role. It was an obvious suggestion, but it proved to be impractical and really unnecessary because we had enough work just in the publication field alone. We don’t want to necessarily say that we’re going to be limited to being publishers. Speaker 1 ( 12:18 ) Certainly, we haven’t abandoned the whole idea of new scholarship, and that’s why we continued our current publications. And Martin Selbrede is certainly an intellectual force that theological force that needs to be recognized. But there was plenty for us to do just in the archives of making what we had available, and we’re still working on that. So we’re accomplishing something very good and something I think that is going to be very useful in the kingdom in the coming years and even beyond our own time. Speaker 2 ( 12:50 ) I’m glad you brought up Martin Selbrede, because many times I’ve heard you say that you don’t consider yourself a scholar, and Martin certainly fits into that category. It’s not that Martin doesn’t have original ideas, but I think what we would all agree is that Martin understood your father’s theology so that as people develop, which your father always said, that there was more things to develop, that Martin is able to have a discerning view that says, This is in line with Rushdoony’s thinking. This is not in line with Rushdoony’s thinking. Do you feel comfortable that he has that role role? And was it a difficult choice to say, I think Martin should hold this position? Speaker 1 ( 13:35 ) No. And so Martin, by the way, is our Chalcedon’s vice president, and he does not work for us except very part-time, and He volunteers a lot of the time that he does spend with Chalcedon. But he has his own employment, and he dedicates a lot of his time to Calcedon and Christian reconstruction, merely because he is very knowledgeable in my father’s writings, as well as his own scholarship and his own research. I’m very confident that Martin is intellectually capable of doing important things. I wish that he was in a position where he could be writing and researching full-time because he has certainly a lot to give. Speaker 2 ( 14:18 ) People often tell me, because I did get to spend 15 years under the discipleship of your dad, they often tell me they wish they knew Rush personally. I say, Well, if If you’ve read his books or heard his sermons and lectures, you do know him. Would you agree with that statement, or are there aspects of your dad that many have still failed to appreciate or realize? Speaker 1 ( 14:42 ) I think that’s a correct assessment. He truly believed in what he wrote, and that was his understanding of life, which is one reason his writing is so powerful. He had this assurance that God reigns. He had this assurance that the Kingdom of God was going to grow. He had this assurance that the powers of evil would not overcome, which is one reason he was very impatient with conspiracy thinking, because he said the tendency of conspiracy thinking was to always point out the evil in the world. He said a lot of conspiracy thinking assumed or spoke in terms of the inevitable victory and advance of evil. In Instead, he actually said, No, the inevitable advances of the Kingdom of God, and we’re part of that, and we should be working towards that. Jesus said, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, not the study of evil, not worrying about evil. So even though he saw some credibility in some conspiracy theories, he saw plausibility in some of them, he would become very impatient because he thought this conspiratorial view view of sinister forces of evil, overcoming us and controlling everything, really became an eschatology for a lot of people. Speaker 1 ( 16:09 ) And it prevented any positive view of the advance of the kingdom in Christian action. It became a very defeatist way of thinking. Speaker 2 ( 16:20 ) I mentioned earlier that it has been 23 plus years since your dad has been gone, and it’s obvious that the world It has changed. He died before 9/11, for example. We never got to see commentary or his points of view and things like that. But in a lot of ways, the world has changed technologically, things that people can do and things that have been lost that, as you pointed out, if a new technology doesn’t replace an old one, some of the things get lost. In what ways have you had to pivot in terms of promoting your dad’s work? Speaker 1 ( 17:00 ) Well, a lot of people might be put off by the context of some of what he wrote, because much of what he wrote was in the era of the Soviet Union. When he referred to, say, statism and the examples of the evil of statism and what statism leads to, he was pointing out to something which is now gone, in many cases, the Soviet Union. And yet that really wasn’t the point. That was a current example. So it would be easy for people to say, Oh, some of his stuff is really dated because he was writing in that era. And people don’t realize that what the Soviet Union was, say in the ’60s or ’70s, is very much part of where Western culture is in 2024. The intellectual atmosphere that he saw amongst academics and where public education was heading is now where the common man very often is. Our culture has become increasingly anti-Christian. This isn’t something you see in examples from here and there, read between the lines, or in some Ivy the individual who was an anti-Christian. Now you see this on the street. You see this in our culture. You see this commonly. Speaker 1 ( 18:23 ) He wrote 50 years ago, that our world was becoming increasingly anti-Christian, and there would be an increasing hostility towards Christianity, and we can very much see that today. Islam kills people by the tens of thousands and has for a millennium and a half is considered a very respectable religion, but Christianity is held in contempt. Not only the de-christianizing, but the increasing anti-christianity in our culture has become very marked. So there has been a shift in our culture, and people sometimes don’t realize that this shift has taken place. Actually, what he said is sometimes more applicable, despite its references to something 40 or 50 years ago than ever before. Speaker 2 ( 19:12 ) I know when you published those two three volume sets, one with his position papers and one with his Chalcedon Report articles, it was good to see the dates when they were done. However, when you’re listening to some of his lectures, sermon series, people will often ask me, Do you know when this was recorded? Sometimes I have a vague notion, but it’s always fun when he’ll mention the president who’s in office or something that you could actually date. But for so many people, I’m sure you hear this, it’s like he could have written it yesterday. Well, of course, we know he couldn’t have written it yesterday because he wasn’t here, but that it was so timely. I think what you said earlier, your father spoke to people in real time. But the principles and the biblical orientation in a lot of ways is timeless. Wouldn’t you agree? Speaker 1 ( 20:07 ) Yes. I think that’s a weakness of a lot of Christians thinking. If they see something as an immediate threat and so they speak in a very immediate context, he tended to step back and say, This is what’s really happening. There’s a timelessness, even to some of his examples that go back to the ’60s and ’70s. Speaker 2 ( 20:33 ) Chalcedon supporters usually hear from you, either in the Chalcedon podcast or in your blog pieces. You don’t tend to sugarcoat the situations in our culture. You continue to repeat that we are witnessing the collapse of humanism. And yet you remain hopeful and persistent in our duty and success, ultimately in furthering the Kingdom of God. Is this a laborious task ask for you or one that actually energizes you? Speaker 1 ( 21:03 ) Well, I think it helps in any situation to be a realist. If you go to the doctor and you get a bad prognosis, at least you have a realistic assessment of where you stand. You wouldn’t want a doctor, for instance, to say, You’re going to be fine. Just go home and don’t worry about it. If you have something serious, then you want to address it because that may save you some grief and some pain and some complications down the road. You need to address a serious medical condition. Well, if our cultural condition, if the condition of our churches today is a dire one, a serious one, we need to do that. Having a realistic assessment of where we are helps. Now, our assessment is always present or past-oriented. We cannot see into the future except to the extent that God gives us an awareness of his future. Our eschatology, where things are heading, helps in that regard because God has given us the end of the story. We can read the last chapter. We just don’t know exactly what the story looks like between now and the end of the story. But we do know that the Kingdom of God is going to continue to grow, and it’s something my father pointed that the forces of humanism are going to fail. Speaker 1 ( 22:33 ) In fact, he characterized our current age as the death of humanism. It’s failing. People look back to the post-war era, let’s say, at good times. Actually, it was an artificial bubble. I mean, the economy was an artificial bubble, recovering from the war, and the positive effects of inflation by the federal government gave us an artificial prosperity. Community coming out of the war, and that looked really good. We also had a certain character from the war years and people’s upbringings prior to the war that had a more traditional, more moral perspective. And so we looked at that as the good times. In reality, we were already in decline as a culture. Religiously, philosophically, we were already on the downside. And we have been for a very long time. We could go back a long time and see the problems in Western culture. It all real stems from the fact that we’re getting away from Christian influence in the Christian basis for life and culture. In a de-christianized world, we’re going to have problems. His ministry really began when things looked pretty good. Then well into the ’60s, things really looked pretty good. Secularly, people had a very, very positive attitude in the ’60s. Speaker 1 ( 23:58 ) Remember, that was the space race. That was part of this cult of science. Science was going to solve all man’s problems, and man’s faith had really already transferred to technology and science as the hope for man’s future. The economy was going along pretty well still in the ’60s, and people were just optimistic. Well, since then, we’ve had a series of problems. What my father pointed out was that humanism is failing us. Some of his first writings in the late ’50s were on the problems in public education. He pointed out where it was going, logically. It was because it was thoroughly humanistic, and we had abandoned Christianity in favor of humanism, and this was becoming apparent in the schools. He predicted these problems in the schools and what was going on there. But the problems in laws, why do our courts seem to be making no sense? Why is there such irrationality? Why are young people rioting, destroying, renouncing the past, destroying what is good and stable with nothing to replace it? He discussed things like this, and he basically said that this is the result of our rejection of God, our rejection of Christian faith. Speaker 1 ( 25:23 ) Faith in man is faith in nothing. It’s putting your faith in something that’s going to fail because man a sinner, and man is going to make a mess of things, basically repeating the sin of Adam and Eve, trying to be a God, and man makes a lousy God. When man plays God, he makes a mess of everything. That’s what we’re seeing in our day. It’s going to worse, but he wasn’t a defeatist. His eschatology said, The Kingdom of God is going to grow. The Kingdom of God will outlast the secular state. Now, how that plays out, you can observe that, and I think it’s pretty observable in pretty much every aspect of life today. We are at the end of the earth of humanism. How it falls, how fast it falls, what’s going to replace it, we don’t exactly know, because one of the missing elements that we can’t predict is when the Holy spirit moves. When God wants things to change, things will change. When God wants people to change, when people turn to God, that’s the work of the Holy spirit, and we can’t really predict that. The timetable, we don’t know. Are we going to live to see a dramatic turnaround? Speaker 1 ( 26:36 ) We don’t know. We don’t even know how this collapse is going to play out. Is it going to be something rather dramatic, such as a worldwide depression? Is it going to be war? We don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening. What he wrote about the failure of humanism and the growth of the kingdom was theologically oriented it. Even though he said it was certain, he couldn’t predict a timeline. There’s just a lot that we don’t know, but he was certainly able to give the big picture of things. That big picture that he started talking about 60 years ago or more is certainly turning out to be rather prophetic. He saw it before most people had, because many people back in the ’60s thought the answer was political. All we needed to do is elect the right as President and things would turn around. All we needed is a majority in Congress or in the State House and things would turn around. My father said, That’s not going to precipitate change. The only thing that’s going to really precipitate change is when we’re going to Christian people. Speaker 2 ( 27:49 ) When you were talking, I thought of the book, and again, their accompanying lectures, Our Threatened Freedom. It’s easy to just put Rushdoony into a theological basis. Yes, he did commentaries on books of the Bible, but he really was an observer of people and how people will reflect what they actually believe. In other words, you don’t really have to figure out too much. What does somebody believe? Just look what they do. He has a long history of being perceptive and wanting to understand. So long before Chalcedon, there were books that were being written. He was a Missionary on a reservation in Nevada. Speak a little bit as to why he thought this was a good preparation for what he felt God was calling him to do. Speaker 1 ( 28:42 ) Well, he was still in seminary, his last year in seminary, and he heard about this Mission work in Nevada. It was a mission church in a tiny community on reservation. Most of the people on the reservation, they were widely dispersed, and this was just a tiny little community. The Mission Church had been without a mission pastor on and off for several years and had been run by the denomination he was then in, which was the denomination he had been raised in, Presbyterian Church USA. He knew of the work and its need, but the remoteness didn’t really bother him because he missed being on the farm. He liked the rural lifestyle. When he was a boy, being in a farm was pretty isolated because it was a mile into town and he had to walk it. The family never owned a car. So you were somewhat limited. And so the isolation of being on a reservation 100 miles from the nearest small town. It didn’t bother him. He also thought, Here’s an opportunity. If I have big ideas, if I want to express these in my writing, here’s a pastoral opportunity that I have to speak to a people about the importance of Christian faith. Speaker 1 ( 30:09 ) If I can make the faith relevant, he said to the Indians on the reservation, then I’ll be able to make it relevant to anyone. So he just saw this as an opportunity, really, and a training. Speaker 2 ( 30:23 ) Now, if I’m not mistaken, time-wise, you were not alive when he was on the reservation, correct? Speaker 1 ( 30:29 ) I was born about a year after he left, and he was a pastor in Santa Cruz, California. Speaker 2 ( 30:35 ) This may seem like an odd question, but at what point, while growing up, did you recognize that your dad was someone special? Speaker 1 ( 30:44 ) That’s hard to say. He was always a pastor, so people looked up to him. In that sense, it was pretty obvious. I knew he was different than a lot of dads because he often worked at home. From the time I was about nine years old, he was working at home to a large extent. I think probably when I saw that a lot of people outside our circles, beyond our immediate community, regarded him was when I was in high school. I actually spent a year in my high school in Virginia, and the school there was familiar with him, and they often referred to him. In fact, we actually used one of his books in a history class, This Independent Republic. I saw that people spoke of him in very, very different ways, and that his influence was much bigger than I had really realized. I was in high school, probably before I realized that his influence was much, much greater than I could observe at home. Speaker 2 ( 31:44 ) So along with that, you must have been aware of the fact that your father evoked some really strong criticism inside the church. Was that a difficult thing for you to understand, or by that time, did you realize that it wasn’t so much a personal attack as what your father was saying in terms of implications of scripture? Speaker 1 ( 32:07 ) I noticed that also probably in high school, even before I saw his larger influence, I would hear people discussing what he said when he wrote Institutes of Biblical Law, I saw people characterizing that who obviously hadn’t read it in a very negative way and saying, Oh, well, that he’s talking about justification by works, which he wasn’t. He said that in his introduction. People who say that, and that’s probably the biggest criticism in the church throughout the years, they haven’t even read the introduction where he says, I’m not speaking about justification. That’s a settled doctrine. But I’m speaking of the doctrine of sanctification. It’s how we obey God and grow in grace. That was probably one of my first influences, probably in my earlier mid high school years, where people were speaking negatively of what he was saying about biblical law. That’s probably even before biblical law was originally published. Speaker 2 ( 33:05 ) I mean, the lines were drawn. I know one of the issues that gave him a lot of criticism was that he made the statement that if you limit the Kingdom of God to the church, you’ve limited it extensively, that the Kingdom of God includes everything, not just the family, not just the civil government, not just the church. Speaker 1 ( 33:28 ) I could see very often where people referred to him, their attitude was generally, without even understanding all of the issues involved, their attitude was, Christian, he goes too far. And yet, in a lot of ways, maybe he didn’t go far enough. He really saw what people of his time and that failed to see. The church, generally, was somewhat oblivious, and a lot of it had to do with their eschatology, a lot of it had to do with their theology. That was a problem in the But even in churches that really had even a better theology, they were really stuck in defending the Protestant Reformation and the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, and they weren’t really applying the reform faith. So even in reformed communities, there was and remains a hostility to any specifics about how we apply the faith and what is the duty of a Christian today in society. Speaker 2 ( 34:26 ) There’s a fact that most people probably won’t I don’t know, because why would they? But before Ross House Books, which is the publishing arm of Chalcedon, was formed, your father had written the Institutes of Biblical Law, and he gave the printing rights. He maintained the copyright But he gave the printing rights to, I believe it was Presbyterian and Reformed. They kept the printing rights until at some point, I believe we asked and said, Could we have it back because it would be easier for us to discount books, et cetera. Anyway, the person who had taken over a PNR from his dad asked me, just in general, How many copies do you think we sold of Institutes of Biblical Law from the outset? Now, Knowing the widespread effect your father’s writing had, I thought it was going to be something like 500,000. And his answer was, No, it was about 25,000. Now, that’s remarkable when you consider how far and how extensive Christian reconstruction has developed. Would you attribute that to the blessings of the Holy spirit? Speaker 1 ( 35:42 ) Yes. And we’ve often quoted the truism that ideas have consequences. My father knew that his early books… Let me go back. His early books, such as Intellectual Schizophrenia, Messianic Character, One and the Many, by what standard These were really geared more towards academics. They were written in a somewhat different style. By the mid ’60s, they realized he wasn’t getting anywhere by just influencing or speaking to scholars. He said his real receptive audience was laymen. So he began writing to what he referred to as educated laymen, people who wanted to understand what was going on and who were receptive, particularly with the disillusionment of a lot of Christians when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential race. It just looked like this left wing invincible force was controlling our country for a time. He said people then were ready to recognize. What he was trying to move people from is from a political perspective to a theological perspective and saying, Here’s our problem. Here’s where we’ve gone wrong in the past. There’s a lot of history involved in what he writes. A lot of the intellectual leaders of the left are discussed in his writings, and this is why we are where we are, and this is where it’s heading, and this is the Christian alternative. Speaker 1 ( 37:10 ) This is how we should be thinking as Christians. He had to lay a lot of groundwork for what he said. That’s the warp and woof of his writing. We still have to tread a lot of that same ground coming away from the errors under which we’re now living. We have to re examine what God’s word says, and we examine so many areas of life and thought in terms of the Bible, and this is what his real gift was. It’s easy to get lost in my father’s writings, though, because he says so much and he covers so many aspects. One of the problems of reading my father is, periodically, you have to stop and try to intellectually digest what he said. Because he comes at something from so many angles, and he gives you so many ideas, and discusses so many fallacies of humanistic thought that you just have to stop and slow down until you can mentally catch up in some way and get the big picture. Speaker 2 ( 38:13 ) It’s interesting that you say that because I’ve taught through the Institutes of Biblical Law for over 20 years. The tendency is for someone to say, I want to get through this book as fast as possible. I always advise them, don’t. Take it chapter by chapter, section within section, because if you can’t see how it’s applicable to your day-to-day life, then you’ve even missed the thrust of why Rushdoony wrote this. Speaker 1 ( 38:40 ) Also, once you see where he’s going with something and his evaluation of where we are, it really helps disabuse you of this simple conspiratorial thinking. It was a cartoon strip back in the ’60s, Pogo, I think it was called. One of its famous was, We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have been destructive of a Christian influence because we are so influenced by humanistic ideas, and it’s going to take time for us to weed them out. Maybe they will collapse quickly. We don’t know. Maybe it’s something we’re going to have to work through for many, many decades beyond our lifetime. We don’t know how things are going to play out. Certainly, we don’t know, as I said, what the Holy spirit is going to do. And yet there’s going to be a change. Our eschatology tells us of the increase of his government, there’ll be no end. And that’s still a promise. And that’s the blueprint we have for the future. We just don’t understand how we’re going to get to that conclusion from where we are today, but it’s going to happen. That’s why we can be confident in our faith. Speaker 1 ( 39:54 ) That’s why we can speak negatively of things and yet still have a positive outlook on life. Speaker 2 ( 40:00 ) We’re coming to the end of the time, and there’s a couple of things I want to bring up. Originally, when Chalcedon started, your father’s lectures, his conversations were produced on cassette tapes. Who still has cassette tapes? Who can still even utilize, even if you kept all those cassette tapes, what would you do with them? Then there were CDs, and now we have MP3s. What’s it like keeping up with emerging technologies? Are you like, Oh, my goodness, what are we going to do when the next one comes out? Speaker 1 ( 40:31 ) Well, that’s an interesting question, and you just keep plugging away. Unfortunately, I’ve had, because I didn’t understand a lot of the technology involved in real-to-real or preserving the cassette tapes or the CDs or putting them on computers. I’ve gotten good help, a lot of volunteer help. Churches have helped sometimes with financing a lot of this work, so it hasn’t all been done directly by Chalcedon. It’s very gratifying to see a lot of this come about and where we’ve gotten it. Sometimes it’s easy to be discouraged in what we have to do with a small staff and a very limited budget. But then you step back and you say, Well, look what we have preserved. Look what is still available in the modern technology. It’s very gratifying to see what we’ve managed to accomplish. The good that I think that’s going to be done from keeping this material available. The great influence of Christian reconstruction is really from individuals. You mentioned how relatively few copies of institutes of biblical law I have been produced over the years. It’s people who spread these ideas. And a Christian reconstruction movement, because it doesn’t have a lot of prominent leaders, individuals producing new material, it’s still bigger than it was when my father passed away, bigger than it was in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s, because people have adopted the ideas. Speaker 1 ( 42:09 ) People have been influenced by reading it. Families have been influenced. Churches have been influenced because their pastors have read the material. So the ideas are dispersing. They’re getting out there. There’s a lot which is encouraging about what we’ve been doing in the past and where we are now. Speaker 2 ( 42:28 ) You did mention that Chalcedon has a relatively small staff. I think sometimes people envision big ideas necessarily have big institutional administrative functions. And yet I know and you know that we’ve got people behind the scenes that do the proofreading, typesetting, designing book covers, handling office duties of shipping books, taking orders, and processing donations. Is it a concern for you that Chalcedon has a small staff? What would you say at this point is Chalcedon’s greatest need? What do you think Chalcedon’s greatest need is at this point? Speaker 1 ( 43:08 ) That’s difficult to say. Certainly, as I’m in charge of paying the bills, I’m always concerned about where we stand financially, what projects we’re even capable of undertaking. We do struggle financially at times. One of the things I hate spending money on is the facilities. We have a large amount of pavement and it’s beginning to look like a gravel road because it needs so much work. I hate spending tens of thousands of dollars on asphalt when we don’t know what our income is going to be like next year. Often, then we just have to ignore certain things on our physical facilities because we don’t have the income. Knowing we had a strong financial base is always helpful, but I don’t think that our problems are essentially financial. What we really need is we need to keep focused on what we’re doing, and we don’t always know what are going to need to be involved in six months, a year, or two years from now. Making sure that the ministry stays focused and we use what we have in the best way possible and the most efficient way possible. It’s just always a challenge. Speaker 2 ( 44:21 ) Calcine has an underwriter program where people donate so much every month, and that helps with the basic operations of the ministry. Then there are people who give regularly. I would underestimate the importance of people praying for the Ministry, praying for wisdom of those who are making decisions and things of that nature. Would you agree that that’s not, Oh, yeah, and if you get a chance, pray for us? Speaker 1 ( 44:48 ) Oh, absolutely. We really, really would appreciate people praying for us and just remember our needs. Asking for funds is something I’ve always hated doing. We got to do it on a regular basis. But I would mention one thing before we close, and this is true just in the last eight weeks. We got an estate gift. Our checkbook was dry. I was trying to figure out how we were going to make payroll. We got an estate gift that’s probably going to get us by. Until things pick up, usually our income picks up at the end, at the very end of the year, year-end giving. But several times throughout the year is when we’ve had a real financial crunch, a serious crunch, crippling financial crunch. An occasional estate gift will come in. Never millions, but something that will get us by. Chalcedon has always managed to get by, but I’m constantly aware that some of our more serious financial crunches have been answered by estate gifts of people that we cannot even thank anymore. So remembering us in your state giving, not to the of your family and your family obligations, but it has been a tremendous help in the past. Speaker 1 ( 46:06 ) Their planning and their foresight in remembering us in the work of Christian reconstruction has done a tremendous amount of good for us and has helped us, sometimes in very trying circumstances. Speaker 2 ( 46:20 ) I often have the opportunity because your wife, Darlene, shares it with the staff, things that people write in when they give their donations and such. For a lot of these people, we’re talking about people who are in their 70s and 80s, and they remember, and they were young people when your dad first started his work. They always talk about how much Chalcedon helped them. They consider that the help that they received far outweighs any financial support that they were able to give. I think that’s a really important maybe fact to end on and get your comment on. Chalcedon wants this to be a two-way street, a personal help for people like, How might I deal with this? Or, What’s a good book to give to my neighbor, my daughter, my friend? We’re really interested in taking all the resources that your father’s work produced, since we know what they are, being able to share them with people and saying, Oh, this would be something really good, or, This is something to share with your professor. Any comment on that? Speaker 1 ( 47:29 ) My father often noted that the tithe was given to the Levites. The Levites serve various functions in society. This is before the government programs. They were involved in education of various kinds. They did a lot of social functions such as charity. You gave to whichever Levites you wanted doing a work that you thought was important. The Levites then gave a 10th of what they got to the Aaronic priesthood who were in charge of the temple. The tithe was not taken to the temple given to the temple priest. It was given to the Levites who were doing social work. The tithe represented how you thought that you were giving it to the Levites. You thought we were doing important work. When people give us their tithes or offerings, we recognize it as them saying that we think you’re doing an important work for the Lord. We realize there’s a A lot involved in people writing a check, and we greatly appreciate it. But people will sometimes say, My work is not Christian work. My work is very dull. It’s very harder for me to see how my work is actually furthering the Kingdom of God. Well, God provided for that. Speaker 1 ( 48:48 ) That is the tithes. That’s the tithes and offerings. Your work provides you an income. And so your work then becomes productive in the Kingdom of God to the extent that you are giving by tithes and offerings to God’s work. It’s actually you’re doing something very substantial, and you’re making a very substantial contribution to the Kingdom by funding it. Tithes and offerings are the funding mechanism of the Kingdom of God. Everybody is involved in building the Kingdom, even if they’re not directly involved in the work. They are directly involved in building the Kingdom. Speaker 2 ( 49:24 ) I think that’s a good thing for people to keep in mind. Well, Mark, I really appreciate you spending the time giving us a personal look in what it’s like to be you in the role that God has given you. Anything else before we close that you hoped we would cover but didn’t? Speaker 1 ( 49:42 ) I would just say that I do very much appreciate our givers, and Darlene and I do pray for you on a very regular basis, and thank God for you. Speaker 2 ( 49:51 ) OutoftheQuestionpodcast@gmail.com is how you reach us, and we look forward to being with you next time. Speaker 1 ( 49:59 ) Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit chalcedon.edu.…
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1 303: Is the Lord’s Supper the Christian Passover? 1:07:34
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1 302: Why Should I Even Bother to Vote? 1:03:28
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1:03:28This transcript was auto-generated. If you would like to submit edits, or volunteer to edit more transcripts for us, please reach out . Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your host is Andrea Swartz, a teacher and mentor and founder of the Chalcedon Teacher Training Institute. Thanks for tuning in to this edition of Out of the Question. How many times have you heard recently, this year, 2024 is the most consequential election in our country’s history. And not just one political party or news pundits repeat this, we hear it over and over. The propaganda machines are oiled and running as Christians are cornered into thinking that if they don’t have clear godly choices, maybe they just shouldn’t vote at all. My guest today, Ricardo Davis, is here to answer the question, Why should I even bother to vote? Ricardo has a long and impressive resume as a political activist dating back to 1984, where he has been active in the Constitution Party of Georgia and your right to life, among other things. He is active in seeing to it that voter integrity is maintained and is relentless in identifying that our only true hope is in obedience to God’s law word. He also happens to be a husband and a father. Thanks, Ricardo, for joining me today. You are so welcome. And again, I’m honored to be here, Andre. I’ve been a fan of the podcast for quite a while. All right. Well, thank you for that. Now, when we discussed having you on the program, you told me that you wanted to emphasize the principle of the voters’ accountability. You said that the voter is accountable to the Lord to obey him regarding the selection of our representatives, although there are many hindrances and roadblocks to exercising that prerogative. What did you mean by that? Well, there’s the hindrance is one being in the choices we have. There’s one, and then there’s the hindrance of the selection process itself. This is one of those areas where I do believe the message of calcium that is to actually take responsibility and build will hopefully have more traction as we enter into this season of our nation and our community’s history. It’s very accurate. You also pointed out that one option most pastors and pundens omit is that if you aren’t represented by a particular political party or organization, then you must take some level of responsibility to build something that promotes biblical morals and ethics with an eye to the future. In other words, you don’t have good choices now, grow them. Yes, I’m 60 now, so I’ve seen a lot of politics in my lifetime. One thing that I’ve realized pretty early is that if you just allow the system to make your selections for you and you don’t take an active role in the process of getting to those selections, nothing will change. Agreed. Now, you are definitely not a Johnny come lately. I looked at your resume, we go back to the mid ’80s. So we’re talking 40 years and maybe interspersed through all that or other things that you didn’t even list on the resume. But here’s the thing. A lot of people have this wake up. Oh, man, We’re not doing things the way we should. Then they think it’s like a half hour TV program, a 60 minute TV program. We’re going to get this done right here and now. Why is that really dooming people to be frustrated, disappointed, and then giving up? Well, because there’s very little satisfaction when you look at the process in that constrained time frame. For example, people are looking right now just in the current presidential election. We haven’t even gotten to the election yet. The Republicans champion, which a lot of Christians, and especially our pro-life folks, have been out there saying, Oh, we got to vote. It seems the further we get into the campaign, the more disappointing the Republican nominee has Then it raises questions. I think what we need to do is we need to take the long view. I would say, again, one of the things I’ve learned from Dr. Rush doing in, the folks there at Cal Seedon, is when we take the multi-generational view, in other words, are my actions today helping build something so that my grandchildren and great grandchildren can not only receive the fruit of, but carry it forward. That is the mindset that I am trying to bring into the world of political action. Now, it’s so easy for people to say, Well, what good has that done? 1984, 40 years, what’s been accomplished? Well, without the work and the foundational principles that you laid, would we have such a stark antithesis of the party, for example, that wants to kill children, maim children, make sure that they can’t reproduce? Then the other party, now, we don’t have to say, Look, they took certain things out of their platform, but there still is a stark difference. They’re not going around saying, Let’s kill children. That’s our hope. That’s our future. Let’s mutilate them. If people don’t see that as part and parcel of work that people like you have done for the past 40 years, then they’re missing it because the tears are showing themselves to be what they are. I mean, for goodness’ sake. They are, exactly. At first, I thought it was a Babylon bee thing that at the DNC Convention, that they had a bus out there offering vasectomies and chemical abortions. I was like, Whoa, that’s funny, only to discover it was true. I think the term is called epistemological self-consciousness. Self-consciousness? Yeah, that’s it. They’re not hiding it anymore. They’re running on it. What pushed that antithesis if it wasn’t the likes of people like you? We definitely have been able to put a dent But I think part of the challenge, Andrea, is that in the face of, how did King Théodem put it, such reckless hate, we tend to back up and say, Oh, wow, I didn’t expect this. This is part of what it means to stand as a soldier of Christ. In other words, when the Bible exhorts us to not be afraid of sudden terror, well, it’s the expectation of, yes, in a wicked, broken world, it will rear its head. Right. What’s so surprising about pagans acting like pagans, people who hate life acting as those who hate life? I think there’s this naiveté that says, yes, we’re willing to fight But only if the fight is quick because I’m just getting too tired. Ricardo, are you tired? You’ve been doing this for almost 40 years. Are you tired? Actually, I’m more encouraged now more than ever. Now, that may seem crazy to people. You tell me why. Why are you more encouraged now than ever? Well, you put a part of it out there. In other words, back in 2022, when Georgia Right to Life had its annual big fundraising event, the big dinner down in Atlanta. One of the things that I was able to communicate was that one of the primary objectives of the pro-life movement that many of us didn’t see that there would be any movement on, that is the wicked precedent set by the Roe v Wade decision, that we would see it come down in our lifetime. But yet and still, that one big rock didn’t just get moved. It got flucked up by the roof and thrown into the sea. Some people, and this is, I think it’s really important, and I’m glad you brought it up, would say, Yeah, but there’s still abortion that happens in our country. Well, yes, we know that. We knew that the problem with Roe v Wade was that a Supreme Court decision set law, which it never did, but people took it that way. Why Why are people unwilling to take the small victories? Why does it only count if it’s a huge victory? Well, again, you have those that essentially don’t see the world for what it is. In other words, just like our salvation, once we are converted, then there’s the long walk, the long faithfulness, the ups and downs of life, the struggles that we all go through. We assume that, well, that may be the case in an individual life, but it doesn’t work that way in politics. It’s like we flip the switch and everything’s okay, and that’s just not realistic. Nor is it cognizant of God’s plan that the Kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdoms of the Lord and of Christ. If you’re just in it for you, if you’re just in it so that, okay, I’ll be active for a little bit so that I can say I’m doing my part. It really isn’t about our part. It’s about the Kingdom of God. So does abortion have any place in a righteous society? No. Does homosexuality have any place in a righteous society? Does the abrogation of the law of God have any place in a righteous society? The The answer is no, no, no, no, no, no. Right. So some people think it’s a political battle, primarily we’re in. But I think in a lot of ways, it’s a battle within the church because You have people who are focusing on the need for personal salvation, but they don’t believe that God can save a nation. They don’t believe that God can save a culture. And part of that is they wanted to be Abracadabra as opposed to, Oh, guess what? We are the vehicles in order to produce that. Well, yeah. And there may be some theological and eschatological things in play here that lead to that understanding. However, it just isn’t the case. You can’t even look at the history of God’s moving through history in and through his people and see that that’s the case. A lot of people will say, Voting isn’t in the Bible, and democracy is not God’s way of doing things. He wants representative government, blah, blah, blah, blah, believers who would stand on righteous positions to get them not to vote? Is that part of the propaganda? Oh, that’s a big part of the problem. And quite frankly, Andrea, that wouldn’t work if the men of God were preaching the whole counsel of God to the people of God. The fact that there’s such a spirit of timidity, quite frankly, in the pullpits to address these things as they present themselves in scripture. Again, in one sense, they don’t want people to look at even broaching the subject as, Oh, now he’s gone political. No, just preach the whole Council of God. Deuteronomy 1, Choose wise and discerning and experience men from your tribes. This is a command. I do like it that in the Pentateuch, it comes across not as, Oh, the national leaders, oh, the senators, the congressmen. I mean, it gets down to thousands, hundreds, and fifties, and tens. In God’s economy, our responsibility to choose those who will exercise civil justice are much closer to us in God’s economy. And we can talk a little bit more about how that really does need to be recovered as God’s people strengthen themselves and armor themselves in the full armor of God. Indeed. You make a really good point. People will know who’s running for president. They may know who’s running for senator or congress. I would dare say a lot of people don’t even know the name of the mayor of their city. Yeah, or in Georgia, we have counties, and then the administrators of the county’s business or the board of commissioners. How many people know who, not just the name, but Are they acquainted with the man or woman who represents them in the government that is closest to them? I’ve always thought it would be a great practice to invite, we call them supervisors out here, county supervisors in California or in the city government, the district councilman or something like that. Why aren’t you asking them out for coffee? Why aren’t you getting to know them? Why don’t you know the dates of their kid’s birthday or their birthday so you can send them a birthday card? In other words, we think it all depends on this national level. Quite frankly, most of us will never talk to the person who inhabits the White House. The White House. But the man who’s essentially responsible for the administration of government right where you live, you can drive to his house. And the way that I think a lot of leaders get this idea of becoming elite, I don’t know that they all start off that way. I think a lot of them probably start off with a desire to serve. But when they’re treated as though they are part of this elite group and not regular people, then it’s very easy to then take the stepping stone and, okay, I was the mayor, now I can be the assemblyman. Now I can be the congressman or whatever. They get more and more distant from the people and closer to the elite, which It is part of the problem we have in all parts of our nation. True. In one sense, Andrew, we like it like that. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay more attention to what’s happening in our own county. Yeah. A lot of Christians, and again, the propaganda machine made sure they knew this, that the Republican National Committee took abortion out of its platform. Now, my first thought, and maybe I’m cynical, was like, Okay, well, it’s been in the platform for a long time, and is there a lot of movement in terms of, on the local level, stopping abortion at a local level. See, now this is one of my favorite subjects right here. The question becomes if our pro-life friends are dismayed at what happened at the Republican National Committee’s platform committee, which, quite frankly, it was a travesty. It was not representative of the delegates who were there, who took the time and expense to get there for the platform committee, and they pretty much just were given something that they had the rubber stamp. However, what can you do here where you live? For example, in Georgia, what Georgia Rides to Life is doing is We’re looking to build a culture that respects the personhood of all the souls in that community as the cornerstone for advancing personhood as the right to life for every innocent person. We do this through what… One angle of how we do this is through the Georgia’s Ending Abortion Coalition, where we’re not looking for endorsements from our coalition building with all these national groups. We’re doing this with individuals and organizations and even local political parties at the local level, the city and the county level. Glad you brought that up because I have a funny story years ago, and I’m thinking now maybe it’s 10 or 15 years ago. There was a mayoral race in San Jose where I live, and the candidates were coming door to door. That was good. I I asked each one of them, What’s your position on abortion? The answer, first and foremost was, Well, this isn’t a partisan race, Democrat versus Republican. I said, I didn’t ask you if you were a Democrat or Republican. I asked you, What’s your position on abortion? At first, both candidates were hemming and hawing, and then at the end said, Well, this really isn’t an issue for the cities because we have to take our instruction from the state and federal government. I said, I don’t think you have to. Well, now the person was getting uncomfortable and then said, I believe in a woman’s right to choose. He didn’t even leave his brochure. I guess he figured, I’ll save this for someone. But we have to be able to see that this is, yes, it’s not a partisan issue. It’s really a matter of justice. It’s a justice issue. Oh, and to the point you’re making, now, I just happen to have nearby, of course, this is audio, so people can’t see it, but I have a copy of Matt Truella’s, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates here. What you’re bringing up is so crucial, and I believe very few people who are involved in the fight for life, whether it be on the abortion end, whether it be on the euthanasia, wherever. They don’t understand the dynamic here. The way God has ordered society, it is the responsibility of that man who was running for that local office. That if what happens in Sacramento is unrighteous, then that man running for mayor or that man running for supervisor, it’s his responsibility to be the bulwark to protect the people from injustice. You brought up the idea of personhood, and I had to look back in my records, but in 2011, I interviewed Daniel Becker, who was part of Georgia Right to Life. And the issue- My predecessor, yeah. And the issue was personhood. Why is it better to frame the issue in terms of personhood rather than babies? Well, specifically because from Dan’s perspective, his generation, when they got involved in the pro-life movement, it wasn’t because, per se, child sacrifice was barbaric, but it was because of a recognition that because that child in the womb is a person, it is a living human being endowed by its creator with certain unalienable rights, that they got involved. That ideal of coming to the word of God, Coming to the law of God and then seeing what the law of God prescribes with regard to the rights of people, doesn’t just take care of what I call the Big Three in the Pro-Life Movement, Abortion, Infanticide, and euthanasia. But let’s take a hot topic that’s going on right now, in vitro fertilization. The very year you had that interview with Dan Becker, I was actually working in Mississippi and helping out the personhood Mississippi team with an initiative basically to amend Mississippi’s Constitution to recognize the personhood of all human beings. Wouldn’t you know? Well, actually, I’m doing this in hindsight now. We expected the pushback from National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood action. We were expecting pushback from all those courts. But you know what we didn’t expect? We didn’t expect that the in vitro fertilization lobby in Mississippi would spend millions of dollars against Initiative 26. That was the amendment that was on the ballot. Quite frankly, that was the beginning of my education. I mean, I understood what the process was for in vitro fertilization, but I didn’t understand the business of in vitro fertilization, which at that time was completely unregulated, and for the most part is around the country. It’s unregulated. The fact that, oh, well, in order to get the biggest bang for the buck, you get as many eggs as you can, you fertilize as many of them as you can, and you start implanting. Once the couple is done with as many children as they want, then they just discard any that or they donate them to science. All that egregious behavior, essentially, it is the commodification of humans. We are treating these tiny humanlike properties. Quite frankly, especially on… Because one of the big things Dan would talk about back in the 2000s is just all of the egregious research happening at the state and the national level on these children that were created and then experimented on. The fact that right now, the IVF conversation is coming back around, and let’s just say we know a little more about what’s happening. Again, here’s our incremental advance. We are actually getting the chance to connect with people. It’s like, Oh, well, if you’re going to quote Psalm 139 and say, Oh, well, if God knitted me in my mother’s womb, then if human, if the doctor tries to reproduce the process outside, is it any less human? And if it isn’t, then what does ethical treatment of those humans mean? And did you know what actually happens in those IVF claims? I believe we do have an opportunity. People talk about, well, even when they talk about you bad, when they badmouth you, if it’s on the front page of the big newspaper, you at least have an opportunity. Exactly. To make something of it. Well, that’s what the personhood movement, the personhood alliance, the organization that Dan Becker helped found to be the antithesis to the National Rights of Life organization. We’re taking advantage of the opportunity right now. Yeah. I think it goes back to, if you don’t look at every area of life and thought, as Dr. Ashtun used to say, through a biblical lens, you’re going to accept things that later, when you find out would horrify you. I don’t know, you said you were a fan of the podcast, but I have had a doctor on who talked about what it’s like with organ donations. Oh, yes. Heidi Klesig is her name. Yes. I Now, a lot of people, when they listened to it, they were like, We had no idea that’s what took place. Now, will that mean anything to someone who doesn’t honor the word of God? Well, maybe, but not at the same way it should mean something to the people of God, because there are plenty of places in scripture where we’re promised if we violate God’s law, we can expect awful things to happen. So when you want to try to figure out why awful things happen, if you believe in climate change, why climate change, if you believe in all sorts of other things, asking the question, why? Well, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, not very long, but they’ll tell you why. They’ll tell you why. But see, Andrea, that means that the God of the Bible is being taken as who he presents himself as, not the truncated modern that we have. Exactly. That we traffic in. Again, I think this point right here, I think, is illustrative of what I call the big divide in the pro-life movie. A lot of the division you will see in the pro-life movement comes on this point right now, and that is, does the word of God define our morality and ethics? And are we accountable to him in how we exercise our duty before him in this area. This is a question that I wanted to ask you. There’s a fight within the pro-life movement. If We are going to have this big umbrella called the pro-life movement between those who are saying that we need to do things incrementally, which doesn’t sound too far off from what you were saying, that you have to be patient. But over the subject of whether or not abortion is murder, and would you say that there should be laws on the book that you don’t need a new law that says you shouldn’t murder. Most localities and states have that as that. But to include in that abortion, why are so many pro-life people so adamently against this idea that they actually try to kill bills that would say abortion is murder? Well, if I tweak the language just a little bit that abortion is homicide. The question before the court then, the exercise of justice is to determine whether or not, basically, what homicide it was, Whether it was an intentional murder, whether there was coercion involved, whatever. Why is that? It gets back to the statement here, what you talked about. The reason why a lot I’ll say even sincere Christian people out there are reticent to deal with the matter as it is. In other words, if you say abortion takes an innocent life, then is it homicide in terms of all the parties that are involved in procuring that abortion? What are the penalties? See, when we don’t We want to acknowledge that the word of God is applicable to every area of life, when we want to basically do our little cutouts, that’s when we run in the problem. The pushback is, for example, what’s going on in the Republican Party right now is that the pushback is, well, we will honor God with our lips, but with our deeds with regard to the exercise of justice to the preborn children, our autonomy comes first. That’s why every state in the Union that Supposedly, and especially those that have strong pro-life laws that prohibit or regulate elective abortion, they all have cutouts such that the woman will never be charged in a homicide for an elective abortion, period. That, I think, in a very strange way demeans women that says, You know what? Maybe they just can’t help but murder because women can’t have this understanding that what they’re doing is voluntarily ending a life. That’s one thing. But also it plays into the victim mentality that says every woman who gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be pregnant. I mean, that happens within marriages. Sometimes it’s like, Oh, no. Another kid? We weren’t expecting another kid. But why would that justify then killing? You could have that kid and kill one of the kids that already lives with you. Maybe if you don’t even like that kid. Why are we getting rid of it? In other words, it’s saying- When you start asking those inconvenient questions, people don’t want to talk to you. Exactly. I think part and parcel of what we can do, and I think this is that… I mean, George Duny always spoke to families because families are the basic institution. Those homeschooling families need to include geometry and trigonometry if you think you need them. But make sure your children understand the word of God in light of contemporary issues and realize the hate that will be thrown at you if you say things like, Abortion is murder, therefore, those who participate are participating either as the actual murderer, the one who goes in. I’ve always compared it to the mother is like the person who gets a contract, a hit on her baby, and then pays the abortionist to do it. Then there’s the structure around the abortion to make sure he can keep doing it. When we look at it that way, talk about not making friends. They’re like, you’re weird. Truth divides in that regard. Here’s another thing. You talked about, since you mentioned Deuteronomy 28, One of the consistent themes throughout the Bible is that the shedding of innocent blood pollutes the land and that there are real-world consequences for allowing that to continue. We talk about crop failures. We talk about, for example, the rise of wickedness within the population of such a land. There is a cycle that begins when the level of injustice gets to the point where we will shed innocent blood and not require at the hand of the one that shed innocent blood. It’s just for me, it’s very clear that that is just a reality in terms of the universe God has created as gravity. As we take a look at the situation, I think, and you’ve pointed this out with IVF, for example, you have to go deeper. When the exposé came out about abortion clinics, planned parenthood selling the remains of children who were murdered so that medical research can be done. And how many people know that a lot of the additives in foods to make them taste better actually come from cells from aborted children? Now, a lot of people go, Oh, that’s just so disgusting. Don’t even tell me about it. Well, there are some very popular brands. If you just got to have it, and you don’t know why you got to have it, but you know you got to have it, that your taste buds are reacting to something. In a lot of ways, Ricardo, how many people are comfortable with the fact that we become truly a cannibalistic society? Well, see, no, we are Way to enlighten. We are not nothing like the Aztecs, nothing like any of the societies that Lord Acton talked about in his treatise on Human Sacrifice. We’re nowhere like that. But again, What is the only mirror that will allow us to see ourselves and our culture for what it really is? The only thing is the word of God. Yes. I think a lot of people, because the propaganda machine has been rolling for a very long time, if you say, for example, whether you’re talking about IVF, or you’re talking about organ donation, or you’re talking about medical research that helps with certain diseases and the research material comes from aborted children, we want to say, But isn’t this a good? We thank God for the children who are produced through IVF. We thank God for the people who get a transplant. But if you don’t know the particulars, should you be thanking God or should we be thanking the tempter who basically provides technology for us to sin cleanly? As opposed to recognize that we’re sinning actually? Here’s one of the things that organizations like Georgia Right to Life, we have to essentially step into. So what do you tell the Christian parents who son or daughter would not be alive if it wasn’t for the fact that, Oh, they got a donated heart from somebody who said, I wanted to be an organ donor? I mean, pastorally. How do you… I mean, pastorally, how do you do that? And quite frankly, it’s not just a pastor’s job. I think we in the pews need to think long and hard about the consequences of the choices that we made as a culture and how this lands in real lives and to have a bit of compassion for situations like that because you never know. No, I agree. But I think this is where The foundation of your faith is important because we know that there are things that happen in life that aren’t part of God’s stated will. When Cain killed Abel, he wasn’t going to chapter and verse and saying, I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do. No, he wasn’t. He violated God’s law. Some might say, Well, it wasn’t written down yet, but you know what? He violated God’s law. Human beings know when they violated God’s law. Adam and Eve knew it, they immediately hid. So it’s not like, Oh, gee, what if no one ever told them? You know. So there are a lot of things. If a child is conceived in rape, we would never say God prescribes rape. No, that’s not part of his revealed will. However, in his secret will, however you want to phrase it, he has a purpose for that life to be there. So it isn’t so much to slam women who’ve had abortions. They already, I’m pretty sure, if they’ve come to faith, know the heinousness of what they’ve done, but an actual fact, to say, You know what? We don’t need to keep doing this. This brings judgment. So you tell somebody who’s received a heart or you’ve received whatever else, and say, In God’s plan, this was supposed to happen. However, once you realize what took place, that the person who gave up that heart wasn’t really dead until such time as that heart was removed, are you comfortable with the fact that someone else was killed in order for you to get the heart. Now, if somebody is offended by that, well, let them be offended by that. But you know what? That’s not treating others as you would want to be treated. There you go. And so a lot of Other people will say, Well, they were going to die anyway. Oh, I see. Take somebody who’s 90 years old and you really like their eyes. Well, let’s just pluck them out because I could really use their corneas. We don’t do that, but hopefully we’ll never get to doing that. But you see the slippery slope. Yes. I think that hard conversation, Andrew, is what we need to have because we live in a culture where essentially we can do stuff like that. We With the technology, the medical technology that we have, we can do those things. If there are no moral and ethical guardrails there, then you can have situations where, oh, well, when you get to be so old, then we can basically just pick you apart and use you in such a way that you will be a good Good to society. And then it goes on the flip side of evil, what takes place in China, where they have destination transplants. Now, if anybody actually thought it through, you’d say, wait a minute, I’m going to show up in August and I’m going to get a liver transplant or I’m going to get a lung transplant. How do you plan for that unless you are waiting to get rid of people so that you can take their lungs or their heart? Suddenly, it’s a little different, and that insurance companies will pay for it and it’s okay. We’ve got to be ready to give people the harsh realities. Yes. And again, if I can bring it back to voting, the people that we select as our rulers, they have to have that level of gravity. When we write about the culture over in the People’s Republic of China, if you whitewash those things that are happening in a confessionally atheistic society, then this is what you’ll get. You don’t play footsy with that. This is where the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every area of life helps give us the needed balance we need, whether we’re talking about geopolitical situations or whether we’re talking about what’s happening at the pharmacy in our town or in our city. A lot of people, Ricardo, have talked about we need parallel economies. People have done this with homeschooling or people have done this with medical care or legal care. All right, so how do we have a parallel political economy? Well, first of all, it begins with a firm foundation. In other words, by what standard are you going to create such a party? By what standard of ethics will actually rule that party? You have to nail that first. I happen to be a part of a political party, what is now called the Constitution Party, that basically has that as its foundation. But people say, Well, Ricardo, we live in a two-party system. Well, realistically, what that means… Now, most people say that, but they don’t realize what that actually means. What it means is the two major political parties in power retain their power essentially by legislating. It’s such that any competition will find it very, very difficult to actually get into a place where it’s representative of the people. I tell people here in Georgia, because people, they take advantage of the, Oh, well, we got Republicans and we have Democrats. It’s like, Okay, so how many years since after the war between the states, how many years after reconstruction did it take for Georgia to elect a Republican governor? Most people, because they, again, because they can tell you all the presidents, but they can’t tell you the governors of their state. I think of him in hall, and I was like, It’s 136 years. It took to 2002 before Georgia elected a Republican for governor. That gets back to our multi-generational faithfulness. What this little political party called the Constitution Party, which was started back in 1992, and people say, Well, how many people do you have elected? How many representatives in the What federal legislature do you have? I’m like, Well, zero. However, if you’re going to build for the long term, I just remind them. It’s like, Well, first of all, I’m not trying to elect a president right off the top. I want to elect town supervisors, your local officials who stand upon the foundation of the principles of our platform and the word of God in the exercise of their duty communities in your communities. That is the first and foremost thing. That’s how you build an alternative political movement, a self-consciously Christian political movement that seeks to recover the same covenantal responsibility that our nation’s forefathers had a firm grasp of, and for that matter, the colonial leaders before them had a firm grasp with that. Instead of doing either/or, it sounds like you’re saying and/and both. Yes. For example, I’ll give you a good example. We’re talking about electing folks and voting. Well, the Constitution Party here in Georgia does a lot on the issue of the integrity of our election. But I’m not one to say, Well, I won’t work with Democrats. I won’t work with Republicans. I won’t work with the Green Party. I just basically want all the glory for my party. If what you’re doing is you’re working for the Commonwealth of the Citizens in your state, then as long as there’s, and here’s where the principled incrementalism comes in, as long as you work together on an issue and you insist on acting according to the ethics, the ethical framework that I’m bringing to the table, I can work in good faith with a whole bunch of Republicans, primarily some Democrats here in Georgia, in cleaning up Georgia’s election. I do it all day long. Been doing it quite frankly for about 20 years. Right. Let me say this, that because you’re involved, then you get a chance to talk. When you get a check to talk, they get a chance to listen. They may hear that they’ve never heard before. Now, see, this is where I think, in particular, it is so critical for pastors and teachers to instruct their people in the whole Council of God with regard to the issue of civil government. In other words, how did John Adams put it? Essentially, the Constitution that our founders of this current Republic have given us, they’ve given us a Constitution that was fit only for, and I quote, a moral and religious people, religious being Christian. It is wholly unfit for the governance of any other. When you help your congregation understand why that is from the word of God, then when I am working with these folks who, especially here in the south, got a lot of nominal Christians, or you got the guy who’s been a guy I work with in the Greek Party of Georgia. Not even close to the kingdom. But it gives me opportunities. As we work together for a particular goal in our conversation, our getting to know one another, we have conversations. We can talk about eternal things. Right. The admonition is to let your light shine before men so that they’ll see your good works. But it’s not enough to say, Oh, gee, Ricardo, you do such good works. Ricardo then says, Well, let me Let me tell you why I hold this position. Let me tell you why I’m effective, and you’re now right to the basis of your faith. I’m a sinner who was redeemed, and as a result, I’ve been given a new spirit, and it prompts me to do the things that I do. So turn the accolades into glory to God. God, Amen. And in particular, I don’t love my neighbor because that would be part of the current American civil religion is to be nice. Now, loving your neighbor sometimes, just like loving your children, sometimes you got to tell your neighbor some tough thing, just like you have to correct your children. You have to tell them some tough things. That’s part of what it means to truly love them. Likewise, in civil governance, you have to do the same. On this point right here, because one of the attacks of the enemy is to basically say, Well, you don’t care about, insert group here, whether they’re talking about the homicide of preborn children, then it’s, Oh, well, you don’t care about the mother. You don’t care about the mother. You don’t do anything for the mother. If we’re talking about, let’s just say, welfare rewards, you don’t care for the families that are suffering. This is where, again, a faith that’s actually lived out for all of life begins to be a witness. For example, when most people read about widows in Paul’s teaching, for example, over in first Timothy, talks about honoring widows indeed and caring for them. But we read really quickly past the point there in first Timothy 5, where He talks about, yes, the law in the church with regard to caring for widows, but right in the middle of it, it says, But if anyone does not provide for his own, especially for those of his household, he He has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Again, can we have a credible witness as the people of God in talking about issues regarding caring for the poor when we don’t exhibit it within our own families? We don’t exhibit it within our own local churches. If you are not caring for the widows as the apostolic admonition has commanded us, then we have no gravitas. There is no credibility there for us to speak into the brokenness that is in the world through poverty. Exactly. I’ve always thought when you see widows and orphans, orphans are pretty easy to identify. They don’t have a father. Most people would be considered orphan, even if they have a mother, but not a father. A lot of the women who chose not to kill their children were abandoned by the father of that child. I don’t really know a whole lot about first century Christianity, but I imagine a lot of the widows were not people who just had their husband die, although they were probably that. How about husbands who had abandoned them? How about those who didn’t take care of them or their children who fall into that worse than infidels? We don’t have to go very far. If people within the church recognize that that single mother, regardless of how she became a single mother, is worthy of help and her children are worthy of help, then I think, and this happens in a lot of congregations, so I’m not saying, Ricardo, it doesn’t, but it’s not the emphasis in many. Right. But again, it’s something that it’s not far off. We’re not talking theoretical stuff here. We are talking about stuff that happens right in our own neighborhood. What is the engine? How is it that we are able to do these things? You see it right there in the scripture. It is through the tithes and offerings of the people of God, it ministered to the needs of, first and foremost, the household of God, and then out into the community. This is one of the things that just opened my mind, quite frankly. Having grown up, lower middle class in central Arkansas, and quite frankly, seeing some of the impacts of poverty. A couple of my best friends growing up were twins who were being cared from their grandmother, and they were Or let’s just say their grandmother did the best they could, but they weren’t destitute, but they had very little to speak of. But they both turned out to be fine men because of the care of their grandmother. But my thing is, is the church stepping into that environment and caring for these families? They don’t always have to be pretty situations. Anybody who’s ever helped someone in need will know that you can see how they got there oftentimes. It wasn’t just that bad luck happened to them. There were decisions that were made that produced it. But you don’t always get to choose perfect people. And on top of it, if you have a real cognizance of your own salvation, you weren’t a perfect person either. Oh, come on. Right there. That’s the difference between the hand up people. Let me come over and give you a hand up, versus, well, you know what? If we were dead to sin, but when the grace of God appeared and God spoke life into our hearts, there was nothing in us that gave us life other than the spirit of God in us. See, when we realized that that is our state, our natural state as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, then it really does change your perspective on the effects of sin in people’s lives and how we help them. Yes. A couple of things, and our time is running out. I want to point out that rather than retreating, people like Joseph and Daniel, who, quite frankly, didn’t end up in their positions because it was a matter of choice. Joseph was sold into slavery. Daniel was taken into captivity. But their foundation was such that when God opened up the opportunity for them to lead, they led in godly ways. Yes. I think that is what we should be focusing on with families and churches. Okay, maybe we don’t like the guy from column A or the girl from column B or anything else down the chain from that. We need to be preparing our young people, not all people, because not everybody’s called that way, but to take their place as statesmen, not politicians, because the Bible has statesmen, it doesn’t have politicians, and be able to be grounded enough that when given an opportunity like the Constitution Party, you know what? The zero that you said who were elected, it doesn’t matter. Brought things to the conversation. I remember back in the early ’90s, Howard Phillips, who was very much associated with this party, would get on the radio and would talk. Of course, they wanted him to talk because he was this new party or whatever. Given the opportunity to talk, you got to be ready to give the reason for the hope that’s within you. I think groups that are actually helping in this regard will make it so that people will have their talking points. Yes. We are more than happy to do that. If you go to our website, the Constitution Party of Georgia’s website in particular, I make this very clear in the transcript of a message I gave back in 2008, if I remember correctly, where Our success as a political movement depends upon the fact that there are faithful Christian individuals, families, churches in the state who catch this vision that if we are faithful in little things, if we’re faithful in our family life, if we’re faithful in our business, we’re faithful in our local churches, then that provides an opportunity to be faithful in serving our communities. That’s the only thing that is going to give a restoration of the American Republic, in my estimation. Nothing else will restore the American Republic. Anything else that we do is going to essentially give us another American Republic like what we’re dealing with right now. We have a Constitution because we’re no longer a moral and religious people. That Constitution does very little other than to provide guard rails to the steeds and the criminals that are enmeshed, whether they are elected or not. To that end, I definitely want to underscore that your aptitude as you’re homeschooling your children, your aptitude in self-government prepares your children for other roles of service, whether as husbands and wives, whether as members in the local church, whether it be in a community, whether you’re part of a nonprofit or whatever, or you’re running a business. Your aptitude, your self-government under God’s law, word, prepares you for service. It is a firm and true foundation to provide you a fruitful life of service. Amen to that. Here’s my last question to you, Ricardo. You didn’t just appear out of a rock. There’s the people who’ve influenced you. They’re the books you’ve read. They’re the circumstances you’ve been involved in. If you were advising young people today who say, This guy’s cool. I like what he’s saying. Who are the people that influenced you? What are the books that influenced you? And what might be or should be on their reading list? Okay. I got actually energized to actually participate in the political process in terms of the work of elections through an organization called the Texas Grassroots Coalition. Their work was to essentially train Christians in the principles of government, all the kinds of government, and then to essentially go out and serve, whether you wanted to do a Republican or a Democrat or whatever. Required reading to become a member of that organization was Gary DeMars, God in Government. That would be one of the books right there. It is still in print. You can get it from americanvision. Org. The other would be, in particular, for those of you all who, let’s say you’re hearing some of the current discussion about Christians being involved in politics Christian nationalism and all that other stuff. You really either currently or you feel called to get involved in that area, I highly recommend Dr. George Grant’s The Micah Mandate. That book, which was a gift from my dear wife, really set my feet on a solid ground, and it has allowed me to walk, by the grace of God, faithfully in the realm of politics due to the principles that Dr. Grant lays down in that book. So again, the Micah Mandate, that would be another one. And then last of all, just about anything from the Chalcedon Foundation, I think is most helpful. And again, I would just tell people to just start with law and liberty. If you are looking at the world around you and you are concerned about the loss of our liberty, then getting Rushdoony’s law and liberty helps you understand, well, first of all, what truly is liberty? And what does that look like in the context of civil government and how do you restore it? Those would be three recommendations right off the top of my head. If you all want to get a hold of me, yes, I’m on the social media. I’m on Facebook. I’m on axer. Com, formerly known as Twitter. Those are the two that I frequent most often. Or you can reach out to me at georgia right to life if you want to get involved in pro-life work or you just want to pick my brain on stuff like that. It’s really easy. It’s ricardo@grtl.org. Very good. Lastly, For people who can’t tell because this is audio, but if they’ve seen your picture, you are an optimistic man of color who does not feel as though the world owes him anything. So This may sound weird. Do you happen to be a Christian who’s black or a black man who happens to be a Christian? You know what? I’m going to answer it like this. There was a song that I heard often as a young boy in church, St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, to be exact. It goes like this, I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody who could save anybody. That’s who I am. Yes, if you want to ask me about my ethnicity and all that other stuff, well, yes, because that’s who God created me, that does have something to do with who I am. But it’s not what defines the core of who I am. What defines the core of who I am is that I am a redeemed sinner, saved by grace, alone, through faith alone. Because of the persevering work of the Holy spirit in my life, even in the midst of what’s going on right now, because some people are saying, We’re approaching the end of the American Republic. Well, when my children were much younger, I would tell people, Well, I’m about training my children so that they would be part of the restoration, whether in their lifetime their grandchildren’s lifetime, that they would be part of the restoration. That’s who I am. That’s why because Jesus is King and he will have the victory, that’s why I’m optimistic, because he is who he says he is. Thank you again for taking the time, listeners. You can see a lot of his talks on YouTube and Georgia Right to Life. I would just say, you are who God made you to be, and we encourage people to be who God made them to be. Amen. Be about the work of making disciples, teaching them everything that he has commanded us to do. OutoftheQuestionpodcast@gmail. Com is how you reach us, and we’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit chalcedon.edu.…
This transcript was auto-generated. If you would like to submit edits, or volunteer to edit more transcripts for us, please reach out . Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. Thanks for joining us again. Charles, last week was our 300th episode, and I failed to recognize that fact or that milestone until I posted the recording online. Happy anniversary. Well, thank you. I guess you didn’t get the bottle of champagne I sent all the way to California. Oh, well. Oh, well. You can’t rely on the postal service. They probably knew what it was. All right. So enough of self congratulations. Yes. Megan Basham has written a book entitled Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. Now, Charles read the book first and encouraged me, as along with other people had encouraged me, that you need to read this book, and so I did so, and specifically so that we might discuss the issues the book deals with in this podcast. Now, as you might expect, there are those who love her book and swear by its authenticity and accuracy, and likewise, those who decry her as someone bought and paid for by conservative billionaires to demonize those she highlights in her book. Regardless of the number of her fans or critics, she has most definitely started a conversation. However, our subject today won’t be a synopsis of her book, as you can read or listen to it on your own if you wish, but to deal with a question that has arisen as a result of it. Here’s the question, are we ever safe from false shepherds? Now, Charles, another way I could phrase the question is this, are individual Christians responsible to evaluate the teachings of their pastors and elders? Yes, absolutely they are. There’s plenty of biblical evidence that this goes back to the earliest days of the church. A couple of places in the Book of Acts, in particular, which is the history of the early church from God’s divine law word. Everybody, I think, is probably familiar with the Bereans who examined everything Paul says because they were more noble than They searched the scriptures daily to find out if the teachings they were hearing from Paul or anyone else were accurate. Paul himself even warns, especially the leadership of the churches, and the church at Ephesias, I believe it was the Ephesian elders he met with that’s recorded in Acts 20, and I’m just going to read directly what it says. He meets with them and bidding them a sourful farewell because he’s on his way to Rome. He will never see them again in this life. Among other things, he says this, I know that after my departure, fierce wolves, that’s how he describes it, will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own cells will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years, et cetera. He’s warning these men, even Within the first two or three years or decade or so after the resurrection of Jesus, this problem had arisen, and it has continued right down through the history of the church. It is especially the responsibility of the leadership of the covenant community of the church, of the assembly of the Lord. But also that means also the individual members. Now, I think that there are some caveats there. What exactly does that look like in terms of holding leadership accountable or being responsible for understanding what they say. But I’ll just leave it at that and say, yes, indeed, it is an important responsibility. I realize I’m talking to a pastor. The word pastor could be translated as shepherd. Unfortunately, because we live in an age of formal institutions, when people think of mayor, governor, pastor, elder, whatever the circumstances, in some cases, even father or patriarch, depending on how it’s viewed, that there seems to be this idea that this is a person who’s in control, this is a person who has status. But that’s not what Jesus said nor identified himself as the good shepherd was all about. Let’s talk a little bit about a biblical view of shepherds. Well, then that imagery, as you just indicated, is you used frequently in the scripture, Jesus compared himself to a shepherd. Depending on what commentaries and Bible analysis you’re reading, you may get different opinions about this, but shepherds were not high on the social scale in Old Covenant Community Society. They were largely uneducated and smelly guys who hung around sheep and all that. But they were a vital part of the community, and their job was to look over and keep after their flock day and night. That meant that they had to be on duty 24 hours a day, so to speak. They had to have certain skills in knowing how to herd sheep, how to protect them, how to be on the lookout, to be situationally aware, we might say, that might create danger, how to them to market, all these different aspects of being a shepherd. There were different things that would characterize somebody who was a good shepherd versus someone who was a bad one. A good shepherd would, as I just said, protect the flock. He knew what to do. He knew all the ins and outs. A bad shepherd. Typically, that would be referred to, and I think Jesus even uses this language in one or two of his parables, a hireling, someone who really is not the shepherd, but somebody who’s been brought in to just do this for a little bit, who really doesn’t that much concern. The hireling who is not really the chief shepherd of the flock, the wolves show up to attack, he’s out of there. When the going gets tough, I’m gone. But the real shepherd, he’s there to protect them and keep them from danger. It’s interesting. The subtitle of Megan Bascham’s book was how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda, and she said that they were for sale. In a lot of ways, if you know your scripture, she’s referring to them as hirelings who then don’t have the best interests of the sheep. Now, I’m glad you brought up the fact that being a shepherd wasn’t a high status job. It wasn’t a CEO of a tech company. It wasn’t a person who had lots of land holdings. But one of the things that a shepherd would have to know is how to get the sheep to follow him. Beating up on the sheep, well, yeah, I suppose you could do that. But since part and parcel of shepherds having to have lambs without blemish and that they could sell so that people could offer in the temple, beating up your sheep would not produce that. So they had to be, in a sense, a condescension to the sheep, not that he craw on all fours, but that what he was doing was getting the sheep’s agreement to follow him. That’s not something that we usually think of today, especially with mega churches and celebrity pastors and preachers, where a lot of people gain status by saying, This is my pastor or this is our church, and we have so many people. I’m not sure a shepherd could have handled a herd of 3,000 sheep. I don’t know. I’m not a shepherd. What do you think? No, I think that’s an excellent point. As I was reading her book, I was reminded of something that I guess I implicitly had realized a long time ago, is that when you read about the things that she’s describing, the compromises of prominent, and they were all, as far as I remember, they were all mega church leaders. I guess I would say a mega church is a church of a thousand or more people. I guess it depends. I mean, there’s some communities where there are lots of thousand-member churches, and then you’ve got the really, really big ones with 10, 20, 30,000 members, multiple campuses, and all that. I realized that’s a relative definition. But it’s these big, big churches where these problems tend to be focused. It’s not to say that a church that has 100 people or less is morally superior on a scale to one that has 10,000 people. On the other hand, I don’t know of any small church where the pastor has been compromised along the areas of the ones that she’s mentioned in this book, and that’s created some major problem. Not saying it’s never happened, but simply by the fact that, and I think you’re implying this, that it is a reduced scale that reduces thereby the potential for these kinds of problems. The central thing when you trace this in the history of the church as the Roman Empire became Christian, that’s when the problem started to crop up. I don’t know what the equivalent of a mega church would have been in the year AD300 or AD200. But you have moved from meeting in people’s homes to where all of a sudden the pagans have been routed and you’ve got a supposedly Christian of Rome, and he closes all the pagan temples or gives a lot of it to the Christians to use. That’s when we see things starting to go. I think there’s a reason why it is helpful for the flock of God to be a manageable one and the idea of having a pastoral staff, and God bless those who have this, we’re not saying that if you’re in a church that has a pastoral staff of 30 or 40 people, that’s a bad church. I’m just not sure that’s the biblical pattern or the model that we see given to to us in scripture. I mentioned at the outset that this last week was our 300th episode. Well, I remembered as I was reading her book, that episode 181 of the Out of the Question podcast, where I interviewed Trevor Lauden, who had produced and stored in the documentary, Enemies Within the Church. The question we asked then is, what has made the church vulnerable to infiltration? I think, I don’t know, she never mentioned that documentary in her book, but sometimes you see that people come to the same conclusions coming from different angles. It behooves us to say, what does it mean to be an elder or a pastor in terms of your responsibility? Is it a status? Like, did the shepherds go around and say, Hey, I’m a shepherd, and people are supposed to go, Whoa, he’s a shepherd. Or was the idea of a shepherd, people immediately understood the function of a shepherd. It wasn’t like, wow, he’s a shepherd. It’s like he does a shepherd’s work. As I was going through, I’m currently reading through Rushduni’s Systematic Theology, and in his chapter on the Theology of Work, he makes a big point of saying that the word office that is translated many places in the New Testament, the office an elder, the office of a deacon, is more correctly translated as function. This is what he has to say. The word translated is praxis, a deed, doing, or function. This word places a different meaning on the fact of hierarchy. Because the Bible is not against hierarchy, it’s against elitism, which made it very different than the Hellenic thought of its day. This is what he goes on to say, Hierarchy means that all authority comes from the Triune God and his word. On the various levels of a hierarchy, all positions or offices are derivative. They are functions, deeds, or works ordained by God, and they are legitimate only insofar as they are faithful to God. Then when I read this, and then in line with Megan Bayesham’s book, he says, Thus for an ecclesiastical authority, and he puts that word in quotes, to use the dignity of his function to advocate abortion, disarmament, or homosexuality means that he has denied his function by doing so. Aren’t those the areas that she brings up in this book? Absolutely. That’s precisely the area she does. Yes. So legitimacy comes from being obedient to God. And I would recommend that people read or listen to the book because she documents the fact that this is what prominent people have said, this is who funded them, et cetera. But it’s more a testimony to the fact that we have a function, even if we don’t bear the name or the title or the office of deacon, elder, or pastor, being a member of the church, being a saint, we have a function too. That’s really what I want to get into in this discussion. What’s the method by which a person who’s sitting in a church weekly, how does the person discern, am I being led astray or am I being led to orthodoxy? Well, that’s certainly a challenging thing, especially in this day and time. I mentioned a few moments ago that there would be some caveats that I would throw out, having served in pastoral ministry for over 30 years, I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in terms of what we’re talking about. It’s certainly, I can tell you as a pastor, very helpful to have a congregation of people who are well-grounded in the basics of Christian doctrine and theology. Not that everybody has to have a Bible College degree in those things and be conversive with Greek and Hebrew. But if you have a majority of people who understand the authority of the Bible versus the authority of somebody’s presumed opinions, that’s certainly an important thing. I think that church members, members of any particular gathering who would consider themselves a flock of the Lord and have legitimate pastoral oversight, that they recognize that unless we’re all on the same page, we’re going to have problems. It’s like that old TV show, The Weakest Link. Wherever you’ve got that link, especially in church leadership, but even among the congregation, if you’ve got that one link where the person is marching to the voice of something other than God’s law word as a divine authority or a presumed authority, then when something comes up that must be dealt with according to God’s word, and they’re listening to a different voice, that’s where you’re going to have problems. At a minimum, congregational members should take it upon themselves to be basically conversant with the teachings of scripture, the theological orientation of their church, and recognize also, well, the church I’m in, do we have elders and deacons? Is it just the pastor? Whatever the church government, the policy, what is required of those men to serve in those functions? I’ll start to say offices, I’ll say functions. Okay, no, but the Bible will use that in certain translations. It’s just good to know what it means. Okay, well, this guy that might… Let me just back up. A lot of people in reformed and evangelical type churches where there is a structure of having three offices or three functions, the pastor, elder, and deacons. A lot of them are not really aware of the fact that I served in this in a Presbyterian context for several decades before. I recognize this. Somebody actually pointed it out that in the early church setting, and I mean, say, the first five or six centuries, where you had a gradual growth of the centrality of the bishop of a local area, and that’s another term for elder or leader or chief shepherd, Then the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Church, they call the diocese, the diocese or the diocese and structure, the bishop is the chief pastor of a whole conglomeration of churches. Then under him are priests who function in these various parishes. Well, that’s essentially the same structure we have in the reform church. The pastor is the chief shepherd, but he can’t be at everybody’s house and ministering to everybody all at the same time if you have even just 100 people or less. The elders who make up the board of elders or the session in our context, they are the priests of the diocese, so to speak, if you can compare it that way. In a lot of churches, the congregation will be divided up into family units, and that may be one person or maybe 10 or 12 people in one family, depending on how it’s decided. Each of those family units will be assigned an elder, an overseer. It’s the responsibility of that elder to take responsibility for those under him in terms being available to give counsel, to be aware. If, say, they don’t show up for three or four weeks, or he hears that one person in that family is sick in the hospital, then there’s this interaction. These are some of the responsibilities. The deacons also function that way in the early church to some extent. But it’s interesting that when we read scripture, the types of things that are the big ticket issues that keep coming up in these letters of Paul and others have to do with false teachers and false doctrine. I just I want to read a passage from the Book of Jude that actually Megan Bascham includes in the preface to the conclusion of her book. She quotes Charles Spurgeon, then she quotes Jude from this passage. Jude writes, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s people. These false teachers are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm, shepher who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted, twice dead. ‘ That’s a pretty searing indictment. I thought that was a very interesting language. I’m not sure what translation she used there. These men are shepher who feed only themselves. I think it’s not an accident that she used that passage because it very much describes the type of people that she wrote about in the book. None of us are immune to our fallen natures, and we have to continually rely on the Holy spirit for guidance and help. But it can be, I’m sure, a mighty temptation if you’re, we call in my context, a big steeple church pastor, and all of a sudden here comes some foundation, and we want to give you a couple of million dollars to help you out. By the way, would you mind just mentioning this in your next sermon? I can imagine. Or not mentioning something in your next sermon. Exactly, yes. There’s a couple of points on what you said, but let me first unpack the idea of church government. Because we are all in the midst of humanistic statism on a civil realm, it’s easy to look at government as a heavy hand. Most of us know if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re going to be in trouble. Most of us know that Big Brother is watching. And so there’s this certain idea that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of your government. But that’s not what the government of the church is supposed to be. Yet, I hear people telling me things from different parts of the country, sometimes even in the Bible Belt, on how the whole idea of being a member of a church isn’t so much that will bear one another’s burdens, that I have an issue, you’ll help me, you have an issue, I’ll help you. One person I was talking to pointed out that although she has been attending a church for well over two years or so, she hasn’t joined the church. They will let her help out. She shows hospitality. I think she donates regularly, but she can’t take communion with them. The reason she can’t take communion is that she hasn’t signed up as a member of that church. So first and foremost, she’s not viewed as someone who is the member of the body of Christ, the Church of God. She’s not a member of their church, so they won’t take communion with her, but they will go to the potluck and eat with her, but they won’t take communion with her. When asked, Why do they want you to join? The response was that if you something wrong, then we can excommunicate you. Now, that’s a big lure. Wouldn’t you want to join an organization, a country club, Charles, to know that when you join, this gives the leadership the ability to kick you out? Well, I think that was an unfortunate way to have phrased that to someone. On the other hand, I think that there is some reason to consider that… I’ll use an example of my church. When we have people who come and visit, maybe even frequently. We don’t say this every Sunday. We do have communion every Sunday, every Lord’s Day. But we generally say, if you have been baptized and you are a member of this or some other Bible-believing church, and you are not living in known sin, you’re not under discipline from a church, you’re welcome at this communion table. Maybe let’s think of it in terms of a marriage. I’ll spend the rest of my life with you, but I’m not going to go be……
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1 296: How Do You Build a Covenantal Household? 1:12:18
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1 294: What Do the First Four Commandments Have to Do with Sales? 1:10:33
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This transcript was auto-generated. If you would like to submit edits, or volunteer to edit more transcripts for us, please reach out . [00:00:01.890] Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. [00:00:21.790] Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Out of the Question podcast. What is a doctrine? Web Webster’s 1828 Dictionary has five entries for this noun, which come from the Latin meaning to teach. First, he says, whatever is taught. Thus, a doctrine is anything that is laid out as being true and correct without it necessarily being true and correct. Webster then contrasts the doctrine of Christ with that of Plato. His second and third definitions or entries connote the idea of the act of teaching, such as Christ teaching by parables, and the learning that results in the listeners, their receiving of doctrine. Then the fourth and fifth entries are related and specifically call doctrine the truths of the gospel in general and the instruction and confirmation in the truths of the gospel. So it’s pretty obvious that Webster comes from a biblical world and life view. Doctrine Doctrine is so fundamental to believe that there are principles and ideas that form the foundation and architecture of what it is that we believe. The word of God in its entirety lays out certain doctrines that are stated and restated, implied or can be inferred throughout the Old and New Testaments. [00:01:53.320] We must receive these by faith as our mortal minds, and I might add our fallen minds, cannot fully fathom them. Yet we receive them as true. The Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity, is one example. We believe that there is only one God, but that this God exists in three separate and distinct persons, and that all are equal in power and Majesty, and all are God. Now, if you try to reason that through, it seems like an apparent contradiction or a paradox, yet you go through the pages of scripture, and this is laid out. As noteworthy, most expressions of Christian faith, when you see statements of faith of most Christian denominations, will affirm the Trinity. Well, the doctrine we will be discussing today is one that often brings division. For this reason, Charles and I decided to talk about exactly what the doctrine of predestination consists of. The question we’ll be covering is as follows: do we choose Christ or does Christ choose us? And then as a corollary, is this doctrine something that brings comfort or does it bring somewhat of distress or is it a burden? Charles, let’s begin with a working definition of predestination and the related words we find in scripture, such as for knowledge and for ordination. [00:03:28.990] Well, that’s That’s a major topic. I think the first thing that I want to say about this is that predestination and its corollary doctrines or concepts, election for ordination, these ideas are inescapable. Dr. Rostuni reminds us of this in his discussions on this topic. So someone or something will forever and always be determining what is to take place. Almost always in an unbiblical society, it reduces down to man and a humanistic view of determinism about the present, the past, or the future. In the words of Paul in Ephesians 1:4, to speak to your question directly, he refers to Christ having chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, and to fill it out that we should be holy and without blame and love. That’s one of many places where Paul talks about predestination, election, and the term that is translated there that he chose us in him. Let’s be clear, the Lord chose us in Christ. He’s the one, the Greek term at the back of it is the term from which we get the English word, election. In this case, it has to do with on the individual level, our personal salvation, but the larger level, us having been chosen in that way to be included in the covenant family of God and a part of his kingdom that really began in the Garden of Eden. [00:05:10.940] But with the fall of man, there’s some complications obviously arose, but the Lord promised even there that his chosen seed, the seed of the woman, would eventually eventuate in the birth of the son, Jesus our Lord, who would crush the head of Satan. So even though you may not find the term in the Older Testament translated predestined or elected, although the idea is clearly at large there. I mean, just in that one statement from Genesis 3, that I have put inmity between you and the woman and between her seed and your seed, that is a declaration of what God is doing, not something that he hopes will happen. The basic definition of predestination is that there is a predetermined action that sets forth and sets in motion things that are unalterable and the plan of the person making the full ordination. [00:06:08.980] Okay. It’s probably easy for most people to think, well, of course, those who don’t believe in the Bible, those who don’t recognize and determine that they need to follow the covenant, would find this something that they don’t like. And yet I think it’s so interesting that People who don’t like this idea that God determines things always want to be the determiners in their own life. I mean, if we’re talking election, we’re talking God’s choice. Well, what do we hear all the time? I have a right to choose. I should determine what I want. So it’s not really that they have a problem with choice and determination. They have a problem with their not being the people who make the choice and the determination. And this rejection of God God, as you pointed out, stems back to Genesis 3:5, where the act that Adam and Eve did that basically was transferred to all of us had to do with who gets to determine and who gets to choose. [00:07:18.020] One of the things that Dr. Rastuni points out, he spoke about this issue in a number of places in his systematic theology. But in the great book, Salvation and Godly Rule, which has been reissued in a new format with a nice new cover, there’s an entire chapter on predestination. One of the really noteworthy points among many that he makes in this article is that although the idea of a divine being, in our case, God, the true God, may be absent. Nevertheless, predestination is never absent. There’s always a predestinating, determining factor. You just the fact that people want to decide for themselves, so they try to act as their own God. This is a divisive issue among people, and we’ll talk broadly in the evangelical world, between people who are so-called Calvinists and so-called Arminians or free will versus determined will. It really strikes at the heart of people’s presumption of autonomy. People don’t like the idea that they don’t have a Well, I mean, on some level there is choice involved, but the problem is, according to scripture, we are born into the world with our will to choose the good having been broken. We will never choose God on our own. [00:08:47.230] This is the testimony of scripture. When Jesus says in the gospel of John, No one can come to me except the Father draw him, the idea there, the literal meaning is nobody has the ability to come to him, except it’s given to them by his Father. So right at the very beginning and in the teachings of Jesus, we have this awareness that people of themselves, of their own free will, are not able to choose the good. That’s one of the marvelous things about the merciful grace of God, is that for some, for a vast multitude, as a matter of fact, he changes that and he extends his grace to them so that they have a desire and a will to believe. [00:09:28.620] So I’ve heard people comment on this doctrine. People who I have no doubt, and by my interaction, they love the Lord, but they can’t stomach it. They said, I just can’t embrace this idea. Of course, they will then establish, they don’t think it’s a biblical idea, that God would decide that some people would be saved and some would be judged. This goes back to this idea that a A lot of people want to determine them. Like, I can be whatever I want to be. You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not an authority in my life. And yet it seems odd that believers would have this idea that somehow or other, Just as they have the ability to choose things that they consider good, why wouldn’t they think that God also had this power, or do they think they’re more powerful than God? [00:10:27.370] Well, on some level, whether they would admit it or not, they do. In a church I served some years ago, there was an individual in that church. He was actually an officer. This is a church that was, at least on paper, committed to the doctrines of the reform faith in the Westminster Confession and Standards, which means predestination in the election. This man was an officer, and he totally rejected these ideas. I had a number of discussions with him, and these were, I’d say cordial discussions. I’d never forget He frequently told me, I don’t accept this idea about God choosing who will be saved and who will not be saved, because I think this is where God limits his sovereignty, he said. He limits it in terms of who will determine a person’s salvation. I heard R. C. Sproul put it this way once before, The devil votes against you. God votes for you. You have to cast a deciding vote. Well, if it’s not obvious to most of our listeners, the fact is that the man, the woman, sovereign over their own destiny. Now, that fits well with the modern humanistic understanding of things. But it also condems us. [00:11:40.680] If it’s completely up to our will, as I said before, the testimony of scripture is, our will is broken. We will never choose the good unless God changes us. But yes, people get very upset because it does strike at the heart of the autonomy, the pretended autonomy of the human being. I’m in control. Especially in these United States, where the tradition at least used to be, I’ll pull myself up on my own bootstraps. I’ll go out and homestead and plant my place and do it myself, that thing. A certain amount of self-determination is good. But you can see how in the progress of the religious traditions of the United States as it revolved around the civil realm, that frontier thinking found its way into the theology of what would become the Second Great Awakening and Charles Finney, and we can go way off track with that. But that’s where this idea comes from. But as Rastuni says, you can take God out of the picture, but you haven’t removed predestination. So people don’t mind predestination at all if they are the ones in charge of it, or in many cases, they’re glad for the state, the government, to be the one who determines everything. [00:12:55.360] Well, right. It’s either going to be, in the broadest sense, God or chance. And why anybody would take comfort in chance is beyond me, because by definition, it has no order, it has no rule, and yet people are very content to say, Well, this is just the way it is. I can’t do anything about it. But they do say they could do something about it because they don’t want to say that God determines. Now, one of the objections I’ve heard, and an adament objections, because I’ve had discussions with many people on this, is that, okay, if it’s already established, why bother do anything? And this person was sure this led to the irresponsability of Christians to go ahead and carry out the great commission. But like so many ideas that get reduced down to a meme or a pithy phrase, the doctrine of predestination does not alleviate man from his responsibility to be faithful to God’s law word. If you just extract one part of it, then it does look like it doesn’t matter what I do. I can sit home because it’s already determined. If God already knows, why should I do anything? Why should I even pray about it? [00:14:19.700] After all, it’s predetermined. [00:14:22.440] Yes. As I just said, the challenge for most people is recognizing that this predetermination simply doesn’t go away if you do away with the God of the Bible. You’re simply allocating it to yourself or to some other entity. Now, one area where people are fine with this doctrine is in the form that it’s taught in government schools. It’s the operating assumption of almost every aspect of our culture and so-called science, and that is naturalistic determinism. Marxism is another form of that in a somewhat removed sense. But the idea that there are these forces that have determined all things that are moving in inexorably towards certain ends, or that because of the course of nature, whatever that’s supposed to mean, it means something to modern people, that certain things are a certain way, and it’s determined by that nature that that’s how they would be. Now, it’s significant, I think, that… I hear this a lot from people, especially those who are of what what used to be, you’d say, the Oprah Winfrey crowd, is they ascribe absolute determinative authority to the, quote, the universe. You’ll see this even in some sitcoms in recent years. Well, I prayed to the universe, or I asked the universe to give me this, and there it is. [00:15:47.460] So again, you can remove Jehovah God from the picture, but you haven’t removed the concept. It’s always going to be there. If people are okay with this idea, they may call it by a different name, but we should challenge people to think. You already believe this. Now, you may not like the idea that the Bible, Holy Scripture, ascribes this exclusivity to Almighty God, but that doesn’t mean you have escaped the concept. And The fact is, the only place where you find predestination done or executed in a way that contributes to human freedom, as odd as that may sound to the modern era, is to From the God of the Bible. If we look at all the other examples of determinism as fostered by humanistic man, they inevitably lead to tyranny always. [00:16:42.080] You brought up the concept of free will. Again, this is an area where it’s really important to define what we even mean by free will, because if you say there is no free will and I say to you, Well, I decided to put on a purple shirt this morning. I could have decided on a yellow one or a blue one, but I decided on the purple one. Obviously, I have the ability to choose things. [00:17:09.900] Yes. [00:17:10.700] But what I don’t have the ability to do is to mandate the consequences of what it is I do. So the Bible is full of, if you follow my law, if you keep covenant, if you are faithful, I will bless you. There’s a consequence. If you are unfaithful, If you violate my law, there are curses. So yes, man is free to fornicate. He is free to lie, cheat, and steal. Well, he’s free since he comes into the world with original sin. He can’t really do much beyond that. It takes a intervention from God that makes it so the person who’s self-centered, self-absorbed, selfish in all his ways, whether or not he does a good job of cloaking it so people don’t see it immediately, the transformation that comes isn’t because of anything that we’ve done that merits God’s grace. And that’s the other aspect of this whole idea, you just can’t take an isolated part of what somebody says this doctrine is and remove it from the context of scripture. So yes, we’re free to sin if we want to. However, we’re not free of the consequences of that sin. So therefore, in a sense, and you can correct me theologically if I’m wrong, Charles, we don’t have the ability to do anything else besides sin. [00:18:45.680] Noah, and that’s the universal testimony not only of holy scripture, but those confessions of faith that are solidly based on scripture on this particular topic. Again, this is something that people struggle with, but they do so because it’s at the heart of what they think, as you’re just saying, is their so-called free will. So yes, it’s important to say that when we talk about, as Luther called it, the bondage of the will, we’re not talking about the fact that you don’t have the ability to decide to wear a certain thing or to get in your car and drive down to the grocery store and come back. That’s not what we’re talking about. But we are saying that on a much larger metaphysical scale, that everything that you do is in the determined of God. The fact is, people have this idea that when we start talking about this, there must be thousands and thousands of poor souls out there who are just walking around with their face cast down because they so, so really want to believe in the true God and follow his law. But that mean old God is predetermined that they can’t do that. [00:19:52.650] He’s predestined them to hell, so they can’t do it. They’re so upset about that. I’m being sarcastic about it a little bit because The fact is there is no one like that. [00:20:02.040] Yes. All those people who are walking around saying, I’m just so unable to do this, and God has destined me for this. Very rarely are you going to see someone who is not happy, or at least short time happy in their sin, and saying, I have the right to do it. Here’s another doctrine. We’re all sinners, we’re all depraved, and we wouldn’t be anything else besides God intervening in our lives. So the doctrine of election says, you’re not capable of anything other than what you are. But because God is merciful and just, it’s not that you get away with all the bad things you do. If God has chosen you, then Jesus took that punishment. This idea that Jesus took the punishment for everybody and only those who ask him into their heart are saved, really puts, as you put it earlier, human beings in the driver’s seat. Jesus went through all this, died for the sins of the world, but unless you ask, you don’t get. That seems a very weak and feeble God. [00:21:17.300] I think that we see in stark relief today, one of the logical outcomes of the presupposition, the assumption of the autonomy of man and his desire to predetermine all things for himself and in the collective sense, by the state or the government. The thing that I’m going to mention represents, frankly, a disgusting collusion between the two. I mean, the modern transgender movement. People have been told, and there are a variety of reasons they’ve been told this, but the outcome is the same. Your three-year-old can determine for him or herself what their, quote, gender is. And the state, the government school, the medical-industrial complex, they’re all right there to help you to make this so-called transition to another, quote, gender. And who would I’ve never imagined. I was watching something with my wife today at lunch, and this topic was up for discussion, and how the government schools and the many doctors’ offices are coming right alongside young people, I mean, very young girls and boys who’ve been told they need to struggle with this issue about their sexual identity. I said, Who would imagine? I can remember when I was in high school in the 1970s. [00:22:44.420] I think it was somewhere around ’72, ’73, ’74, at least in the government schools, guidance counselors were given the ability to hand out birth control prescriptions to young girls without their parents’ consent or even awareness. Now, I think if you had said something to a 14 or 15-year-old girl in 1973 or whatever it was, that this is laying the plank that will eventually lead to someone like you, 60, 70 years from now, deciding they don’t want to be a girl anymore. They want to be a boy. I think they would laugh in your face. They would never believe it. But one leads unalternably to the other. And it’s this whole idea of what we’re talking about. I will I am predestined to decide here for myself what is right and what is wrong, what sex I am. It is ultimately my will and my authority. The problem is without the renewal of God’s grace in the Holy spirit in a person’s heart, they will inevitably choose that which is not good for them, not good for their family,…
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