WEBVTT 00:00:37.120 --> 00:00:39.440 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.440 --> 00:00:40.480 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.480 --> 00:00:43.520 Mahler. And I'm Wo. 00:00:43.520 --> 00:00:47.600 Today we are talking about the fact that we are living in 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:49.840 the ashes of Christendom. 00:00:49.840 --> 00:00:54.480 We're living in an age where Where we had part of an 00:00:54.480 --> 00:00:59.840 inheritance that came from those before us that used to be Christian, 00:00:59.840 --> 00:01:03.040 and some of us are still Christian, but 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:09.840 the structures underneath the the foundational aspects of what gave us the 00:01:09.840 --> 00:01:12.800 world that was inherited have really gone away. 00:01:12.800 --> 00:01:17.200 And so today's episode is about the fact that different people from 00:01:17.200 --> 00:01:20.000 different groups as they look at the state of the world as 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.840 you like you you turn on the news or you hear reports 00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:27.360 of what's have going on in your community or in other communities 00:01:27.440 --> 00:01:32.000 or just nationally or globally globally, it's not just that it's bad 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.880 news, and it's not just that the news seems to be getting 00:01:34.880 --> 00:01:36.400 worse. It's that 00:01:37.520 --> 00:01:40.400 the news seems to be horrific. 00:01:40.400 --> 00:01:45.040 And it's becoming horrific in a way that's almost impossible for some 00:01:45.040 --> 00:01:46.720 people to categorize. 00:01:46.720 --> 00:01:51.760 And so as a result, there's been a real movement, especially online, 00:01:51.760 --> 00:01:54.720 it's visible because you can sort of find all sorts of communities 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:59.040 there. There's been a movement to sort of return to tradition. 00:01:59.040 --> 00:02:01.040 Yeah, it's a meme you've probably heard. 00:02:01.040 --> 00:02:03.600 And everybody wants to sort of pick their own tradition. 00:02:03.840 --> 00:02:06.480 they think that there's a a period in time that's going to 00:02:06.480 --> 00:02:07.440 work great. 00:02:07.920 --> 00:02:09.920 For some of the Zoomers, it's the eighties. 00:02:10.080 --> 00:02:13.360 You know, they look at uh Vaporwave and think that must have 00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:16.800 been, you know, kind of the peak human experience. 00:02:16.800 --> 00:02:19.200 Some folks look to the fifties and look at, you know, sort 00:02:19.200 --> 00:02:24.880 of the June Cleaver uh suburban post-World War II neighborhood as the 00:02:24.880 --> 00:02:29.040 ideal. If you're a southerner, you may look to the antebellum south 00:02:29.040 --> 00:02:31.280 as sort of peak civilization. 00:02:31.440 --> 00:02:35.120 Some people go back to the Renaissance, uh, and some people, particularly 00:02:35.200 --> 00:02:40.560 if they're not Christians, will prefer to point back to ancient Greece 00:02:40.560 --> 00:02:45.600 and ancient Rome, or even you know Phoenicia or the Etruscans. 00:02:45.600 --> 00:02:48.320 Because if you go back far enough and you cherry pick what 00:02:48.320 --> 00:02:51.760 it is you're looking at, you can sign find something that seems 00:02:51.760 --> 00:02:55.840 good and beautiful and certainly seems like an improvement over what we 00:02:55.840 --> 00:02:57.280 have today. 00:02:57.280 --> 00:03:00.880 But what we want to talk about is why those things were 00:03:00.880 --> 00:03:04.240 good and why they seemed good and whether or not we can 00:03:04.240 --> 00:03:09.280 just return, whether you can reboot the eighties or the fifties or 00:03:09.280 --> 00:03:14.000 the eighteen fifties or uh there there's something that uh Dr. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:18.560 Koontz on the uh brief history of power podcast mentioned it last 00:03:18.560 --> 00:03:24.640 year, I think, talking about the the pernicious notion of nostalgia that's 00:03:24.640 --> 00:03:28.800 kinda popped up where where we have these affections for periods without 00:03:28.800 --> 00:03:31.120 understanding what was good about them. 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:34.640 And we think that we can just go backwards and get it. 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:35.200 And so 00:03:36.080 --> 00:03:38.720 I want to begin today briefly with a story. 00:03:38.720 --> 00:03:42.240 It's something that I just serendipitously read this morning. 00:03:42.240 --> 00:03:47.680 Uh twenty one years ago over the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle 00:03:47.680 --> 00:03:50.560 of the night there was an Airbus A three hundred thirty that 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:53.920 was flying at six and a half miles up. 00:03:53.920 --> 00:03:58.560 And unbeknownst to the flight crew or to the passengers, a few 00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:02.640 days before the maintenance crew had made some mistakes when they were 00:04:02.640 --> 00:04:04.640 replacing one of the engines. 00:04:04.880 --> 00:04:10.000 And so when those mistakes started causing problems during the flight, the 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:14.640 pilot and co-pilot also made mistakes as they were processing the inputs 00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:17.120 they were getting from their lights that were flashing. 00:04:17.120 --> 00:04:20.160 And basically the problem was that they had a fuel leak. 00:04:20.160 --> 00:04:23.520 One of the engines had burst a fuel line directly to the 00:04:23.520 --> 00:04:27.120 engine, and so it was just pumping fuel overboard in addition to 00:04:27.120 --> 00:04:29.680 some of the fuel getting into the engine so it was still 00:04:29.680 --> 00:04:30.960 running. And 00:04:32.080 --> 00:04:34.720 I'll put the link in the show notes in case you're interested 00:04:34.800 --> 00:04:38.800 in the sort of the process of how they figured it out. 00:04:38.800 --> 00:04:41.680 The reason I'm mentioning this story now is I think it's a 00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:44.560 really good example of what it is that we're doing as we 00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:46.160 look at the state of the world. 00:04:46.160 --> 00:04:51.120 Because what happened at six and a half miles up at like 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:56.480 four in the morning, the V the jet lost and exhausted the 00:04:56.480 --> 00:04:58.000 last of its fuel. 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:03.200 And so one second, the jet was traveling like 400 knots, it 00:05:03.200 --> 00:05:05.280 had 34 and a half thousand feet. 00:05:05.280 --> 00:05:08.800 The lights were on, the people knew something was wrong, but you 00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:10.000 know, it was still flying. 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:13.520 It was a jet and it was flying to its destination. 00:05:13.520 --> 00:05:17.840 When the last of the fuel was exhausted and the engine flamed 00:05:17.840 --> 00:05:21.920 out, they were plunged into darkness, and there was total silence on 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:25.040 that plane, except for the sound of their screaming, because that was 00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:26.960 obviously terrifying. 00:05:26.960 --> 00:05:30.480 Now, from their perspective on the jet, they knew that they were 00:05:30.480 --> 00:05:33.440 in real trouble because the lights were out and you know it's 00:05:33.440 --> 00:05:37.360 obviously this was bad and it wasn't going to get any better. 00:05:37.360 --> 00:05:40.320 But as an external observer, I want you to think about the 00:05:40.320 --> 00:05:44.160 fact that ten seconds before the jet engine went out, it was 00:05:44.160 --> 00:05:46.480 at six and a half miles up, it was going at four 00:05:46.480 --> 00:05:50.000 hundred knots, everything seemed fine, it was flying. 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:53.680 When the fuel ran out, five seconds after that, it was still 00:05:53.680 --> 00:05:56.320 going at four hundred knots, and it was still at six and 00:05:56.320 --> 00:05:57.680 a half miles up. 00:05:57.680 --> 00:06:01.520 So as you're measuring it kind of from a distance, it seems 00:06:01.520 --> 00:06:02.880 like everything's okay. 00:06:02.880 --> 00:06:07.920 It still has the momentum it had before the fuel was exhausted. 00:06:07.920 --> 00:06:10.960 And if you took a measurement a minute later, they're probably going 00:06:10.960 --> 00:06:12.640 about thirty knots slower. 00:06:12.640 --> 00:06:14.960 They were down about two thousand feet. 00:06:14.960 --> 00:06:19.280 Um the good news in this case is that the pilot, although 00:06:19.280 --> 00:06:23.280 he had misdiagnosed the failures, uh he was a former Bush pilot 00:06:23.360 --> 00:06:25.840 and he was actually a former narco trafficker. 00:06:25.840 --> 00:06:28.400 So he'd been on some sketchy planes before. 00:06:28.400 --> 00:06:32.960 And he was able to fly this plane with no power, just 00:06:33.120 --> 00:06:34.160 he wasn't really flying it. 00:06:34.160 --> 00:06:36.080 It was a glider at that point. 00:06:36.080 --> 00:06:40.000 He managed to get it 75 miles to the Azores, because again, 00:06:40.000 --> 00:06:41.920 they were over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 00:06:41.920 --> 00:06:45.280 He found the nearest airport where they could land that thing and 00:06:45.280 --> 00:06:47.120 he successfully got everyone there. 00:06:47.120 --> 00:06:50.240 There were a few minor injuries from the landing, but no loss 00:06:50.240 --> 00:06:51.280 of life. 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:55.760 Um so it had a happy ending in that case, but I 00:06:55.760 --> 00:06:58.560 think as an example for us, I it as soon as I 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:00.480 read that it struck me because I knew we were gonna be 00:07:00.480 --> 00:07:02.080 talking about this today. 00:07:02.080 --> 00:07:05.440 It's similar to our situation in this. 00:07:05.440 --> 00:07:10.800 The thesis of this episode is that Christianity is and has been 00:07:11.120 --> 00:07:16.960 the fuel of Christendom's ascent and trajectory for the last fifteen hundred 00:07:16.960 --> 00:07:22.640 years. And the fuel has run out and we're not even coasting 00:07:22.640 --> 00:07:23.760 on fumes anymore. 00:07:23.760 --> 00:07:25.680 We are just gliding. 00:07:25.680 --> 00:07:29.120 And so the reason that we're losing altitude and things are getting 00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:33.520 bumpy and people are starting to scream is that the fuel is 00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:37.680 gone. And we want to talk about today the fact that most 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:38.960 observers 00:07:40.160 --> 00:07:43.760 don't understand, they haven't diagnosed the problem, just like the pilot hasn't 00:07:43.680 --> 00:07:46.000 diagnosed the problem until the very last minute. 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:47.520 So they don't realize that it's out of fuel. 00:07:47.520 --> 00:07:48.960 They just think, well, the plane's going down. 00:07:48.960 --> 00:07:50.000 It should go back up. 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:53.280 You know, maybe they just need to return to their prior trajectory. 00:07:53.280 --> 00:07:56.080 Not understanding that the thing that made it a plane in the 00:07:56.080 --> 00:07:58.720 first place, the thing that was keeping it in the air was 00:07:58.720 --> 00:07:59.600 the fuel. 00:07:59.600 --> 00:08:04.880 And so as we are living today in the ashes of Christendom, 00:08:04.880 --> 00:08:09.600 if we don't recognize that Christianity has been the fuel that has 00:08:09.600 --> 00:08:13.680 given the West all of the good things that it has, not 00:08:13.680 --> 00:08:16.160 only are we not going to be able to diagnose the problem, 00:08:16.160 --> 00:08:19.760 but we're not in any position to restore any of the former 00:08:19.760 --> 00:08:21.200 glory that we have. 00:08:21.200 --> 00:08:24.160 And the reason it's important to Corey and I to frame this 00:08:24.160 --> 00:08:27.280 in terms of Christianity is that we're we're going to talk about 00:08:27.280 --> 00:08:31.600 about Greece and Rome, but we're going to make the case that 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:35.120 the things that we think are good about the world that we 00:08:35.120 --> 00:08:38.640 have lost are the things that Christianity gave us. 00:08:38.640 --> 00:08:40.480 And the things that we look back with nostalgia 00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:46.560 that seemed beautiful in the distance didn't necessarily have that tenor at 00:08:46.560 --> 00:08:47.440 the time. 00:08:47.440 --> 00:08:49.440 If you had modern 00:08:50.800 --> 00:08:53.680 uh Christian morals, oh, you don't have to be Christian to hold 00:08:53.680 --> 00:08:55.520 them, like Western morality. 00:08:55.520 --> 00:08:58.480 As you know, as it existed a hundred years ago, most people, 00:08:58.480 --> 00:09:01.600 even if they weren't Christian, they still basically believed in good and 00:09:01.600 --> 00:09:02.960 evil from somewhere. 00:09:02.960 --> 00:09:06.160 They believed in not robbing, not murdering, not doing any harm to 00:09:06.160 --> 00:09:07.280 your neighbor. 00:09:07.280 --> 00:09:11.200 And so we're making the case that when the fuel went out 00:09:11.200 --> 00:09:15.040 of of Christianity and it began to die in the West, we 00:09:15.040 --> 00:09:17.840 lost the momentum that was keeping us in the air. 00:09:17.840 --> 00:09:21.360 And the problems we see today are because of that loss. 00:09:22.320 --> 00:09:25.600 And we see this in so many of our institutions, not just 00:09:25.920 --> 00:09:32.720 our government institutions, but also our social institutions, our universities, our corporations. 00:09:32.720 --> 00:09:36.800 So many places it's inertia is what we're running on. 00:09:36.800 --> 00:09:40.480 Things were going at such a speed and for such a period 00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:44.240 of time, with so much mass behind them, that even though the 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:48.400 engine is now dead and cut out because the fuel is gone, 00:09:48.400 --> 00:09:54.160 things continue for a while as if there are no problems. 00:09:55.040 --> 00:09:57.840 But as we go, things get worse and worse. 00:09:57.840 --> 00:09:59.840 Just as if you're in a plane that has run out of 00:09:59.840 --> 00:10:04.400 fuel, you cannot help but notice at some point in your descent, 00:10:04.400 --> 00:10:06.400 things are a little off. 00:10:06.400 --> 00:10:10.160 And so we see the cracks and the fissures forming in our 00:10:10.160 --> 00:10:15.520 institutions, and academia is a great example I'm sure many listening will 00:10:15.520 --> 00:10:19.440 have at some point been on a university campus as a student, 00:10:19.440 --> 00:10:22.400 perhaps some as professors, what have you? 00:10:22.400 --> 00:10:24.800 And you can see this happening. 00:10:24.800 --> 00:10:30.720 The quality of the education dropped off precipitously long ago. 00:10:30.720 --> 00:10:34.400 But the reputation of the institutions remains. 00:10:34.400 --> 00:10:35.840 And so we are turning 00:10:36.800 --> 00:10:41.520 out students, graduates who know far less, who are far less capable, 00:10:41.520 --> 00:10:45.440 and that will have ramifications down the line for society, and we 00:10:45.440 --> 00:10:49.840 see that with collapsing bridges and our space program that it basically 00:10:50.160 --> 00:10:51.760 defunct for decades. 00:10:51.760 --> 00:10:54.720 The private sector has started it up a little bit, again, we 00:10:54.720 --> 00:10:58.800 could debate exactly the specifics of that another time. 00:10:58.800 --> 00:11:03.600 But we see all of these consequences building up as that inertia 00:11:03.600 --> 00:11:05.600 spends itself. 00:11:05.600 --> 00:11:08.800 And so there are those who try to look for some other 00:11:08.800 --> 00:11:11.040 explanation of what has happened. 00:11:11.040 --> 00:11:15.200 And if you don't get to the root causes, you won't propose 00:11:15.200 --> 00:11:19.520 solutions that will actually address the problems you see. 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:22.800 If you happen to be a new listener to this episode, this 00:11:22.960 --> 00:11:26.480 episode will stand alone, but uh if you want to check the 00:11:26.480 --> 00:11:29.680 back archives, we've only this is a episode I think eleven, so 00:11:29.680 --> 00:11:31.200 we don't have that many. 00:11:31.200 --> 00:11:35.680 But I would recommend beginning with the Christian nationalism episode and then 00:11:35.680 --> 00:11:38.800 the one after it about election and view of headship. 00:11:39.040 --> 00:11:42.560 That was kind of a two-parter in one where the first part 00:11:42.560 --> 00:11:46.880 was about doctrine, uh the doctrine of election, so that's a very 00:11:46.880 --> 00:11:48.640 explicitly Christian part of it. 00:11:48.640 --> 00:11:53.360 And the second half was really about the history of Christendom, not 00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:57.840 at a deep level, but but focusing in our case on the 00:11:57.840 --> 00:12:02.400 spread of the gospel and how everything that we think of today 00:12:02.400 --> 00:12:09.200 as Western civilization after Roman Greece has been fundamentally Christian. 00:12:09.200 --> 00:12:11.760 And obviously there was a period of time from about five hundred 00:12:11.760 --> 00:12:15.440 to one thousand AD when different parts of of Europe were being 00:12:15.440 --> 00:12:19.440 Christianized at different rates and at different times, but by about a 00:12:19.440 --> 00:12:23.120 thousand, give or take, it was it was pr the transition was 00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:24.320 pretty well over. 00:12:24.320 --> 00:12:24.800 And so 00:12:26.240 --> 00:12:31.280 generally as Westerners today, when we look back at our history, and 00:12:31.280 --> 00:12:33.920 that is our history, both the parts that were Christian and the 00:12:33.920 --> 00:12:37.200 parts that were pagan, um and I I should note, I I 00:12:37.200 --> 00:12:39.680 don't think I've mentioned this before, but when when we use the 00:12:39.680 --> 00:12:43.600 term pagan, it doesn't mean Thor worshipper, um, which is really a 00:12:43.600 --> 00:12:44.640 modern LARP. 00:12:44.640 --> 00:12:47.440 That's not even th that's a reinvention of something. 00:12:47.440 --> 00:12:48.960 And it's certainly not an insult. 00:12:48.960 --> 00:12:53.520 I I say pagan in contrast to Christian uh another term might 00:12:53.520 --> 00:12:54.560 be unbeliever. 00:12:54.560 --> 00:12:57.440 But that sign it kinda seems more adversarial because if I say 00:12:57.520 --> 00:13:01.360 If I say you're an unbeliever, it's it begs the question that 00:13:01.360 --> 00:13:04.080 you should be believing in something, which I obviously as a Christian 00:13:04.240 --> 00:13:07.120 believe, but I I don't want to pose that challenge to someone 00:13:07.120 --> 00:13:07.840 who's listening. 00:13:07.840 --> 00:13:10.640 So if I say pagan or unbeliever, it means the same thing 00:13:10.720 --> 00:13:14.080 and neither neither should be taken as a pejorative. 00:13:14.080 --> 00:13:19.680 So those European nations, beginning with Greece and and Rome and their 00:13:19.680 --> 00:13:26.720 follow ones, as they became Christian, they largely gave gave 00:13:26.880 --> 00:13:31.120 a transfer of what they had into the more modern era. 00:13:31.120 --> 00:13:36.800 Now there are a few different groups of people on the internet, 00:13:36.800 --> 00:13:38.880 which are obviously just people in real life. 00:13:38.880 --> 00:13:40.800 But it plays out very clearly online. 00:13:40.800 --> 00:13:43.120 As I mentioned, you know, you have kind of zoomers looking at 00:13:43.120 --> 00:13:45.120 the vapor m wave nostalgia. 00:13:45.120 --> 00:13:48.480 Uh there's s some fifties of nostalgia, but for the most part, 00:13:48.480 --> 00:13:51.440 I think a lot of people have a good sense, a proper 00:13:51.440 --> 00:13:54.160 sense that a lot of our problems begin with the light the 00:13:54.160 --> 00:13:56.000 enlightenment, which is absolutely true. 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:00.240 The reason that Christendom is dead today is that the Enlightenment happened. 00:14:00.240 --> 00:14:02.560 And we'll do an episode on that in the future, but it's 00:14:02.480 --> 00:14:05.200 just a given for everything that Corey and I say about this 00:14:05.200 --> 00:14:12.800 stuff. Prior to the Enlightenment, Western Europe, 00:14:12.800 --> 00:14:19.280 Christianity, Christendom reached its pinnacle in terms of arts, in terms of 00:14:19.600 --> 00:14:24.960 cultural advancement, which is kind of a dangerous word because that's what's 00:14:24.880 --> 00:14:26.080 been happening ever since. 00:14:26.080 --> 00:14:31.440 There's been the promise of what's called progress, the promise of improvement 00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:36.400 over previous eras, where it's been done through the lens and with 00:14:36.400 --> 00:14:40.480 the ethos of the Enlightenment, where it wasn't a question of how 00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:42.160 can we serve God better? 00:14:42.560 --> 00:14:45.760 It was a question of can we do this without God at 00:14:45.760 --> 00:14:47.840 all? Because look how well we're doing today. 00:14:47.840 --> 00:14:50.640 Look at all, look at everything that we have built. 00:14:50.640 --> 00:14:54.320 And the mistake that I think that a lot of people make 00:14:54.320 --> 00:14:59.840 today, especially in the sphere of the right, is to think that 00:14:59.920 --> 00:15:07.920 the greatness of Europe's history existed without Christianity, without its influence. 00:15:07.920 --> 00:15:10.720 And that's a really dangerous presupposition. 00:15:10.960 --> 00:15:12.560 we'll talk about that in a few minutes. 00:15:12.560 --> 00:15:15.440 But there's a there's a clear dividing line in groups because if 00:15:15.440 --> 00:15:18.800 if you're not a Christian, if you're a pagan, you're gonna want 00:15:18.800 --> 00:15:22.880 to find something like ancient Greece and Rome, where they had beautiful 00:15:22.880 --> 00:15:27.200 architecture, they had art, they had science, they had civilization. 00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:30.960 It was a proper civilization, it was a godless civilization. 00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:33.600 Uh you can also look east to China. 00:15:33.600 --> 00:15:36.480 Uh if you've ever had the privilege of seeing some three thousand 00:15:36.560 --> 00:15:40.080 year old Chinese art, it is absolutely stunning. 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:43.040 It is it is far ahead of what the West was doing 00:15:43.040 --> 00:15:44.480 three thousand years ago. 00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:47.040 And I say that as someone who looked at that stuff not 00:15:47.040 --> 00:15:51.120 wanting to find that, but just objectively the beauty and the intricacy 00:15:51.120 --> 00:15:54.160 and the advancement of the art that the Chinese had three thousand 00:15:54.160 --> 00:15:56.880 years ago, it's it's breathtaking. 00:15:57.040 --> 00:15:58.560 It's beautiful. 00:15:58.560 --> 00:16:03.760 I think that those periods of time are very interesting because if 00:16:03.760 --> 00:16:08.000 you're a Christian, then you must necessarily be a young earth creationist. 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:12.000 And so we have the flood and we have Babel about forty 00:16:12.160 --> 00:16:13.600 five hundred years ago. 00:16:13.600 --> 00:16:17.280 So three thousand years ago is only fifteen hundred years from the 00:16:17.280 --> 00:16:20.160 Tower of Babel where man was scattered. 00:16:20.160 --> 00:16:23.840 And most of the men who were scattered abandoned God. 00:16:23.840 --> 00:16:27.600 That was that was part of the the election episode. 00:16:27.600 --> 00:16:27.920 But 00:16:29.200 --> 00:16:31.440 the succeeding generations 00:16:32.400 --> 00:16:37.520 fell away from God to different degrees and suffered different degrees of 00:16:37.920 --> 00:16:40.080 punishment and decay as a result. 00:16:40.160 --> 00:16:44.240 I'm not I'm not making that as as a doctrinal claim. 00:16:44.240 --> 00:16:48.080 I just personally based on observing the timeline and observing the state 00:16:48.080 --> 00:16:49.840 of the very Civilizations. 00:16:49.840 --> 00:16:53.040 I think it can be derived from the facts that we find 00:16:53.200 --> 00:16:55.920 from archaeology and from anthropology. 00:16:55.920 --> 00:16:58.080 We can dig stuff up and we can see the state of 00:16:58.080 --> 00:17:02.400 civilizations 3,000 years ago versus 2,000 versus 1,000. 00:17:02.400 --> 00:17:06.400 And I think that if you look at that history through the 00:17:06.400 --> 00:17:11.520 view of knowledge of the true God, it's clear, at least to 00:17:11.520 --> 00:17:14.560 me, and I hope to to some of you that the further 00:17:14.560 --> 00:17:18.400 we got from Babel, the worse it got for people who had 00:17:18.400 --> 00:17:21.600 not maintained a connection with God. 00:17:21.600 --> 00:17:26.160 Now obviously by the time that Jesus arrived, it was really just 00:17:26.160 --> 00:17:28.800 the Jews and a few others who knew of God and God 00:17:28.960 --> 00:17:32.480 and even many of them hated and didn't believe him. 00:17:32.480 --> 00:17:36.880 So uh it's not the claim of material gain, it's the claim 00:17:36.880 --> 00:17:41.280 that without God you will lose other things, even if you lose 00:17:41.280 --> 00:17:44.240 those things with God through chastisement. 00:17:44.240 --> 00:17:48.800 Uh but the fact that China was frankly greater three thousand years 00:17:48.800 --> 00:17:52.240 ago than it was two thousand years ago, I think demonstrates that 00:17:52.240 --> 00:17:56.080 point. And that's the case when you look at Rome and Greece. 00:17:56.080 --> 00:18:00.880 They were degenerate b before before the birth of Christ. 00:18:01.040 --> 00:18:02.800 Yeah. They the in 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:06.560 so to address those who may who might happen to be listening 00:18:06.560 --> 00:18:10.720 who are not Christians, who maybe have a great fondness for ancient 00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:15.200 Greece and Rome, particularly because A, it seems beautiful, and B, there 00:18:15.200 --> 00:18:17.440 was no Jesus around, so you don't have to buy any of 00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:20.400 this stuff that you know we're selling. 00:18:20.400 --> 00:18:24.560 If you actually look at what life was like in that period, 00:18:24.560 --> 00:18:26.960 it was basically like we have today. 00:18:26.960 --> 00:18:33.520 There was abortion, there was sodomy, there was euthanasia, there was cruelty, 00:18:33.520 --> 00:18:36.400 uh boundless cruelty based on 00:18:37.360 --> 00:18:41.040 disqualifying the the humanity of other people. 00:18:41.040 --> 00:18:43.680 And in our case, I mean we're not talking about slavery. 00:18:43.680 --> 00:18:47.120 We're talking just about people who would just be killed because they 00:18:47.120 --> 00:18:50.480 were they were in their wrong class and you could treat them 00:18:50.480 --> 00:18:51.360 like animals. 00:18:51.360 --> 00:18:52.720 You could mistreat them like animals. 00:18:53.120 --> 00:18:55.920 Even if you deal with slavery, although that's an episode from their 00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.800 time, but just briefly, many people like to bring up that there 00:19:00.800 --> 00:19:04.480 was a reform under I cannot remember which emperor now, but there 00:19:04.480 --> 00:19:08.880 was a reform of slavery around the time of the New Testament. 00:19:08.880 --> 00:19:12.080 And all that it changed was that you needed a reason why 00:19:12.080 --> 00:19:14.720 you killed your slave. 00:19:14.720 --> 00:19:16.800 And almost any reason would do. 00:19:16.800 --> 00:19:19.760 Because before that in the Roman Empire, you could just kill your 00:19:19.760 --> 00:19:21.200 slave because you were bored. 00:19:21.200 --> 00:19:24.000 That might still have been a good enough reason after the reform, 00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:28.240 even. But that's the sort of thing you had at the height 00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:30.640 of the power of the Roman Empire. 00:19:30.640 --> 00:19:34.480 And obviously you had the social decay creeping in as well, and 00:19:34.480 --> 00:19:37.040 Greece had already fallen at this point. 00:19:37.040 --> 00:19:42.080 So and you mentioned Phoenicia earlier they were known for child sacrifice. 00:19:42.080 --> 00:19:44.320 That was their big contribution. 00:19:44.320 --> 00:19:48.160 Despite some of the things they achieved in their civilization. 00:19:48.160 --> 00:19:52.000 They burned children alive to their gods in order to get a 00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:55.120 good harvest or favorable winds. 00:19:55.120 --> 00:19:59.120 So you can't look back at these societies and not look at 00:19:59.120 --> 00:20:01.440 the totality of what they were doing. 00:20:01.440 --> 00:20:05.120 They were doing all of the sorts of evil things our society 00:20:05.120 --> 00:20:08.960 is doing today just in a different way. 00:20:09.360 --> 00:20:09.520 And 00:20:09.520 --> 00:20:13.760 it's particularly the things that I think the people looking back fondly 00:20:13.920 --> 00:20:17.600 to those periods are trying to escape. 00:20:17.680 --> 00:20:20.480 We if if you're if you want to return to tradition, you 00:20:20.480 --> 00:20:24.880 wanna return to the Roman tradition because they had indoor plumbing and, 00:20:24.880 --> 00:20:28.880 you know, law and order, you're gonna get all of the things 00:20:28.880 --> 00:20:33.440 that you're trying to escape today as well because they were godless 00:20:33.760 --> 00:20:37.120 and they were in a period of decay even as they were 00:20:37.120 --> 00:20:38.320 building their empire. 00:20:38.320 --> 00:20:40.320 Now there's a lot of political stuff that we're not going to 00:20:40.320 --> 00:20:42.880 get into this because it's not a political podcast, but 00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:46.880 I just want to point we want to point to those areas 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:50.880 in particular to to try to make the case that the wince 00:20:51.040 --> 00:20:54.880 the the nostalgia that we have for those periods if if you 00:20:55.040 --> 00:20:58.560 if you feel that uh I would strongly encourage you to look 00:20:58.560 --> 00:21:02.480 at what life was actually like in those times because I think 00:21:02.480 --> 00:21:06.880 you'll find that the things that are decaying today and the things 00:21:06.880 --> 00:21:11.520 that the Christianization of the West solved are the very things that 00:21:11.520 --> 00:21:13.200 you're trying to escape today. 00:21:13.200 --> 00:21:16.640 And we're making the case that you're escaping it today because the 00:21:16.640 --> 00:21:19.440 Christianization of the the West ended. 00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:22.320 And so we're ret we still have the technology, we have the 00:21:22.320 --> 00:21:25.600 indoor plumbing, we have some of the laws, but there But they're 00:21:25.600 --> 00:21:30.720 rapidly being destroyed one by one precisely because the thing that got 00:21:30.720 --> 00:21:35.360 us here was not that we're white, that we're high IQ, that 00:21:35.360 --> 00:21:38.080 we're good unto ourselves. 00:21:38.080 --> 00:21:43.120 Those to whatever degree those things are blessings, they are not intrinsic 00:21:43.120 --> 00:21:47.440 goods if we are setting ourselves against God. 00:21:47.440 --> 00:21:51.680 And I I think that the societal state of of Greece and 00:21:51.680 --> 00:21:54.240 Rome it in my opinion demonstrates that. 00:21:54.400 --> 00:21:57.200 They were again they were just they were depraved. 00:21:57.200 --> 00:22:01.280 They were doing the same sort of depravity that makes us recoil. 00:22:01.280 --> 00:22:03.600 Whether you're a Christian or a pagan, today, you see the stuff 00:22:03.600 --> 00:22:06.880 that's going on in parades and ever elsewhere, and you're just you're 00:22:06.880 --> 00:22:08.160 rightly horrified. 00:22:08.160 --> 00:22:10.560 You don't need to know God to know that this is the 00:22:10.560 --> 00:22:11.760 face of evil. 00:22:11.760 --> 00:22:15.360 The face of evil was the norm twenty five hundred years ago 00:22:15.360 --> 00:22:19.680 and two thousand year years ago as well, because although they had 00:22:19.680 --> 00:22:24.080 technological advancement and some of it was stunning, what they didn't have 00:22:24.400 --> 00:22:29.840 was the source of moral authority that does not change across time. 00:22:29.840 --> 00:22:34.480 And the loss of that structure, as Corey said, the the fact 00:22:34.480 --> 00:22:38.080 that the underpinnings have been knocked out and yet we still have 00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:43.040 the facade I think makes Christians as well as unbelievers look at 00:22:43.040 --> 00:22:45.200 it and say, well, it's still basically mostly Christian. 00:22:45.200 --> 00:22:47.040 You know, some people go to church and yeah, it's not as 00:22:47.040 --> 00:22:48.560 good as it used to be. 00:22:48.560 --> 00:22:52.160 The reality is that we're not only running on fumes, but the 00:22:52.160 --> 00:22:53.200 engine is out. 00:22:53.200 --> 00:22:57.040 We're still at 30,000 feet, but we're on a glide path to 00:22:57.040 --> 00:22:58.720 the middle of the ocean. 00:22:58.720 --> 00:23:02.320 And in our case, there's not going to be an Azores Island 00:23:02.320 --> 00:23:06.640 for us to land at because the problems that we have are 00:23:06.720 --> 00:23:08.080 the destruction of the airplane. 00:23:08.080 --> 00:23:10.480 Like, you know, the the analogy breaks down at some point. 00:23:10.480 --> 00:23:14.640 You can't you can't save the craft unless you put the fuel 00:23:14.640 --> 00:23:15.520 back in it. 00:23:15.520 --> 00:23:17.360 And in their case, there was no putting a fuel in it 00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:18.160 until they landed. 00:23:18.160 --> 00:23:21.200 For us, the only The only landing we're gonna have if we 00:23:21.200 --> 00:23:24.960 don't get this going in mid-air is going to be the complete 00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:26.480 destruction of everything. 00:23:26.480 --> 00:23:30.000 And rewinding thirty or forty or a hundred or two hundred or 00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:34.480 two thousand years won't fix our problems if we don't know what 00:23:34.720 --> 00:23:38.160 solved the absence of the problems in the first place. 00:23:38.560 --> 00:23:42.880 The word progress is one of those curious little words that people 00:23:42.880 --> 00:23:44.320 always get wrong. 00:23:44.320 --> 00:23:48.880 And so, in keeping with a general theme, terms and their meanings 00:23:48.880 --> 00:23:54.320 matter. Progress, because of the fact that it starts with pro, as 00:23:54.320 --> 00:23:59.040 opposed to say con, leads many to conclude that it is necessarily 00:23:59.040 --> 00:24:02.240 good. That is a secondary meaning of it, it has come to 00:24:02.240 --> 00:24:05.520 be one of the meanings, but that's not inherently what the term 00:24:05.520 --> 00:24:10.320 means. The term comes from pro in Latin which just means forward 00:24:10.320 --> 00:24:12.320 and forward is not always good. 00:24:12.320 --> 00:24:16.160 If you're walking forward and there's a cliff, that's generally bad. 00:24:16.160 --> 00:24:18.560 And the the verb for to walk, that's all it is, to 00:24:18.560 --> 00:24:19.120 walk forward. 00:24:19.120 --> 00:24:20.560 That's what progress means. 00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:23.200 And so what matters is your destination. 00:24:23.200 --> 00:24:27.840 Anyone who goes hiking or camping knows that if you're making progress 00:24:28.080 --> 00:24:31.520 down the wrong trail, that's not a good thing. 00:24:31.520 --> 00:24:34.000 So it matters what your destination is. 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:38.480 Yes, our society is still in some ways making progress, but toward 00:24:38.480 --> 00:24:40.080 what are we progressing? 00:24:40.080 --> 00:24:43.440 Well, we're progressing toward evil, no longer toward good. 00:24:43.440 --> 00:24:46.320 And so you have to be careful when you use these terms 00:24:46.480 --> 00:24:50.480 like progress, because it is one hundred percent a matter of the 00:24:50.480 --> 00:24:54.000 destination, not just of the fact that well I'm still upright and 00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:55.680 walking it must be good. 00:24:55.680 --> 00:24:58.160 That's not necessarily the case. 00:24:58.480 --> 00:24:58.720 And 00:24:58.720 --> 00:25:01.440 this is something that we in the church have fallen for hook 00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:04.080 line and sinker as well, as 00:25:05.040 --> 00:25:13.120 the post-Enlightenment expansion of a fundamentally new religion without God progressed, 00:25:13.120 --> 00:25:18.560 the way cancer progresses in a dying person's body. 00:25:18.560 --> 00:25:22.720 There was the sense that we were leaving the old things behind 00:25:22.800 --> 00:25:26.480 and we were discovering new things and new ways of doing things. 00:25:26.480 --> 00:25:29.280 And what's funny is that if you know history, especially know the 00:25:29.280 --> 00:25:35.200 history of heresies and the history of ancient d degenerate civilizations, we 00:25:35.200 --> 00:25:36.720 weren't inventing anything new. 00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:40.560 We were rediscovering the same old gods that had been cast down 00:25:40.560 --> 00:25:43.280 by prep peop previous generations. 00:25:43.840 --> 00:25:45.840 there's truly nothing new under the sun. 00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:49.600 You're not going to find something that you think is better and 00:25:49.600 --> 00:25:54.320 clever that has not been tried before by people who got it 00:25:54.320 --> 00:25:58.560 from someplace evil and ran with it. 00:25:58.560 --> 00:26:02.000 And so what's happened, particularly I think since you know I mentioned 00:26:02.160 --> 00:26:09.040 Antibellum South, I think since particularly in the United States, slavery was 00:26:09.040 --> 00:26:13.520 ended as a legal institution outside of prisons, which would be something 00:26:13.520 --> 00:26:16.560 we'll talk about in the slavery episode, because slavery is still one 00:26:16.560 --> 00:26:19.280 hundred percent legal in the in the United States today. 00:26:19.280 --> 00:26:21.600 Go read the thirteenth Amendment if you think I'm wrong. 00:26:21.600 --> 00:26:22.800 Slavery is legal. 00:26:22.800 --> 00:26:26.720 It's they changed for whom it was legal. 00:26:26.720 --> 00:26:30.160 That was done principally not by Christians at the time. 00:26:30.160 --> 00:26:37.120 The abolitionists were principally radicals, non-Christians, in some cases they were anarchists. 00:26:37.120 --> 00:26:43.040 And so they were fighting in moral terms for something that when 00:26:43.040 --> 00:26:45.760 they would try to sell it to Christians, it was sold as 00:26:45.760 --> 00:26:48.320 a moral good, as a Christian good. 00:26:48.320 --> 00:26:48.640 And 00:26:49.920 --> 00:26:52.880 Christians are commanded to test the spirits. 00:26:52.880 --> 00:26:54.560 It's one of the things that God says. 00:26:54.560 --> 00:26:57.920 Don't just believe somebody that they show up, whether it's somebody with 00:26:57.920 --> 00:27:00.160 a collar or somebody with a podcast. 00:27:00.160 --> 00:27:03.600 Don't just believe 'em because they say something that sounds convincing. 00:27:03.600 --> 00:27:05.120 Test the spirits. 00:27:05.120 --> 00:27:07.840 Does this accord with scripture? 00:27:07.840 --> 00:27:11.600 What happened, particularly in the nineteenth century in the West, was that 00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:16.800 Was that things like slavery and then following hot on its heels, 00:27:16.800 --> 00:27:20.160 the so called emancipation of women, funny how they use the same 00:27:20.160 --> 00:27:26.000 language, when women were given the franchise, it was done in moral 00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:30.800 terms. It was done in terms of expanding freedom and expanding so-called 00:27:30.800 --> 00:27:34.000 rights and in terms of progress. 00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:38.560 And it was sold in terms that Christians would gobble up because, 00:27:38.560 --> 00:27:42.160 like, oh, that sounds Jesus y because we stopped looking at what 00:27:42.240 --> 00:27:44.720 scripture says about any of those things. 00:27:44.720 --> 00:27:47.760 Scripture has a lot to say about slavery, and it has a 00:27:47.760 --> 00:27:52.160 lot to say about women and about a woman's place in society. 00:27:52.160 --> 00:27:52.480 And 00:27:53.360 --> 00:27:58.560 today when someone hears just the phrase a woman's place, it sounds 00:27:58.560 --> 00:28:00.080 like a physical assault. 00:28:00.240 --> 00:28:04.080 It sounds like I'm this madman that wants to chain women and 00:28:04.080 --> 00:28:09.120 wants to belittle and just treat them as subhuman. 00:28:09.120 --> 00:28:13.040 To know your place in life is is one of the greatest 00:28:13.040 --> 00:28:16.320 blessings. It's the reason that teenagers are so angsty. 00:28:16.400 --> 00:28:18.960 they don't know their place in life, 'cause they've been told they're 00:28:18.960 --> 00:28:22.720 teenagers. We stop saying that they're young men and young women, where 00:28:22.720 --> 00:28:27.840 they have a clear trajectory to adulthood and to entering into civilization 00:28:27.840 --> 00:28:29.680 with their elders. 00:28:29.680 --> 00:28:31.600 We started calling them teenagers. 00:28:31.600 --> 00:28:34.960 Whereas this transitive property and you know, you roll the dice and 00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:36.400 who knows what's gonna come out. 00:28:36.400 --> 00:28:39.200 But you don't have any idea what your place in life is. 00:28:39.200 --> 00:28:43.760 And so for us to say a woman's place Uh it's intended 00:28:43.760 --> 00:28:49.120 as a blessing because God gives clear instructions for what that is. 00:28:49.120 --> 00:28:53.360 And the women who are happiest in this world today are the 00:28:53.360 --> 00:28:58.320 ones who are closest to God's model for what they should be 00:28:58.320 --> 00:29:03.840 doing. Because ontology and vocation, the more they overlap, the more joy 00:29:03.840 --> 00:29:05.360 we are given. 00:29:05.360 --> 00:29:07.760 And the attack on slavery and the attack 00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:09.040 on 00:29:10.080 --> 00:29:14.800 the absence of feminism, which was itself an attack on civilization, the 00:29:14.800 --> 00:29:20.000 creation of feminism as an idea, was done specifically to knock some 00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:22.320 of these supports out of civilization. 00:29:22.320 --> 00:29:24.800 Now to be clear, I'm not saying that slavery was a support 00:29:24.800 --> 00:29:26.000 of civilization. 00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:26.960 I don't believe that. 00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:28.880 I don't think it's a moral good or evil. 00:29:28.880 --> 00:29:30.480 And I think scripture makes that clear. 00:29:30.480 --> 00:29:33.040 So I'm if somebody wants to misquote me, they're gonna do that 00:29:33.040 --> 00:29:35.840 anyway. I'm not saying you need slavery to have civilization. 00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:37.760 I don't believe that. 00:29:37.760 --> 00:29:42.880 However, if you're a Christian, you can have reasons to not want 00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:46.640 or to not like slavery, but you cannot have reasons that you 00:29:46.640 --> 00:29:50.320 ascribe to God because God doesn't do that. 00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:54.320 And what has been happening ever since the 1850s and really since 00:29:54.320 --> 00:29:58.480 the Enlightenment, one by one, we've been taking things where God was 00:29:58.480 --> 00:30:02.400 clear, as we talked about early on, the the genealogy of ideas. 00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:06.960 There's never been any doubt about these questions in all of Christian 00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:11.200 history until suddenly these questions arose and people are like, wow, this 00:30:11.200 --> 00:30:11.840 is fascinating. 00:30:11.840 --> 00:30:15.200 I I I'm really concerned that everyone before me is in hell 00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:17.920 because they were unrepentant sinners for doing these things. 00:30:17.920 --> 00:30:22.720 And so more and more today, worldly ideas that have no genesis 00:30:22.720 --> 00:30:28.160 in scripture, that have no nexus to God, are imported, they're slathered 00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:31.280 in Jesus butter, and everyone is told, Well, yeah, that's Christian, 'cause 00:30:31.280 --> 00:30:32.400 it sounds loving. 00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:34.240 And that has to be the end of the argument. 00:30:34.240 --> 00:30:36.960 And if you point to Scripture and say, Well, what does Scripture 00:30:36.960 --> 00:30:38.240 say about slaves? 00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:41.120 or what does Scripture say about women? 00:30:41.120 --> 00:30:44.560 You're attacked, you're shouted down as an evil person. 00:30:44.560 --> 00:30:47.440 Now, are there evil people who've asked those questions? 00:30:47.440 --> 00:30:48.960 I don't know, probably. 00:30:48.960 --> 00:30:51.040 But is the question evil? 00:30:51.040 --> 00:30:53.120 No. As a Christian, the question is vital. 00:30:54.240 --> 00:31:00.000 And as someone trying to undo the damage civilizationally that we're facing 00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:04.640 today, the questions must be asked because the fuel ran out of 00:31:04.640 --> 00:31:08.960 Christianity as we stopped believing the Bible, even as we talk about 00:31:08.960 --> 00:31:13.680 sola scriptura and how yeah, I believe everything in there, we just 00:31:13.680 --> 00:31:15.840 say, Well, yeah, but that's not what that means, or that was 00:31:15.840 --> 00:31:17.760 in that day, it doesn't really apply. 00:31:17.760 --> 00:31:20.000 Well, no one ever thought that before, and the fact that we 00:31:20.400 --> 00:31:27.360 freely think that now is precisely why civilization and Christendom are in 00:31:27.440 --> 00:31:31.440 a nosedive and we don't know how to fix it because we 00:31:31.440 --> 00:31:35.280 refuse to actually turn back to the God who gave us the 00:31:35.280 --> 00:31:39.600 tools to prevent the decay that is frankly being given to us 00:31:39.600 --> 00:31:41.040 as punishment. 00:31:41.040 --> 00:31:43.760 God is abandoning us to our baser passions. 00:31:43.760 --> 00:31:48.800 And we deserve the destruction if we don't return to godly living. 00:31:48.800 --> 00:31:51.760 And so we're trying to reframe this episode in Christian in terms 00:31:51.760 --> 00:31:55.920 of Christianity because it is the only source of truth that can 00:31:55.920 --> 00:31:59.040 maintain these things over extended periods of time. 00:31:59.040 --> 00:32:01.840 If you live a life in accord with God, you will live 00:32:01.840 --> 00:32:02.960 a blessed life. 00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:06.000 You might not be prosperous, but you will be prospered by God 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:09.840 even if you're poor, even if all your children die in infancy. 00:32:09.840 --> 00:32:11.760 You will still be prospered. 00:32:11.760 --> 00:32:14.160 We don't know what form it's going to take, but we know 00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:15.440 that God will bless us. 00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:17.920 And we also know that God will punish us when we turn 00:32:17.920 --> 00:32:19.040 our backs on him. 00:32:19.040 --> 00:32:20.560 And we've done that. 00:32:20.560 --> 00:32:20.880 And 00:32:21.760 --> 00:32:25.840 Corey and I want people to ask the questions about, you know, 00:32:25.840 --> 00:32:28.000 w maybe we need to turn on the lights in here so 00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:31.120 we can see what we're doing because we're not looking to scripture 00:32:31.120 --> 00:32:32.480 when these problems arise. 00:32:32.480 --> 00:32:35.520 And if Christians can't look to scripture to help guide the rest 00:32:35.520 --> 00:32:36.080 of the world 00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:39.680 how are we doing our duty as Christians? 00:32:39.920 --> 00:32:44.160 Are we not hiding our light under a bushel if we can't 00:32:44.160 --> 00:32:48.240 even explain how evil is evil and good is good and maybe 00:32:48.240 --> 00:32:51.520 we should do one and not the other, and here's why. 00:32:52.160 --> 00:32:52.320 And 00:32:52.320 --> 00:32:55.840 if you look at all these movements that were born really as 00:32:56.160 --> 00:33:01.120 the children of the Enlightenment, which would be the anti slavery, feminism, 00:33:01.120 --> 00:33:03.760 all of these various things. 00:33:03.760 --> 00:33:08.160 One of the underlying goals is atomization. 00:33:08.160 --> 00:33:13.680 The goal is to separate people, men and women, from from 00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:17.280 the groups into which God placed them. 00:33:17.280 --> 00:33:19.840 It's to separate women from their families. 00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:21.920 It's to separate men from their families. 00:33:21.920 --> 00:33:25.280 It's to say you're not a member of a class or a 00:33:25.280 --> 00:33:29.040 group or a race or any of these other things, you're an 00:33:29.040 --> 00:33:33.680 individual. And it's only you, you're the only one who matters. 00:33:33.680 --> 00:33:36.080 And that's not how God made us. 00:33:36.080 --> 00:33:40.320 And that's the reason it's fundamentally subversive all of these various movements. 00:33:41.280 --> 00:33:44.480 And the reason that it knocks the legs out from under any 00:33:44.480 --> 00:33:49.440 civilization, that's the death of Christendom, that's the death of civilization. 00:33:49.440 --> 00:33:53.200 When people, when men and women start thinking of themselves as an 00:33:53.200 --> 00:33:59.040 individual, first and foremost, instead of a father or a mother, or 00:33:59.040 --> 00:34:02.960 a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, because these 00:34:02.960 --> 00:34:05.760 are the things God made you. 00:34:05.760 --> 00:34:10.080 You are in the family God gave you because God gave you 00:34:10.080 --> 00:34:11.840 that family. 00:34:11.840 --> 00:34:14.800 God created you in the womb to make you part of that 00:34:14.800 --> 00:34:19.040 family, to make you a child of your mother and your father. 00:34:19.440 --> 00:34:22.320 God made you the rest of the race that you are. 00:34:22.320 --> 00:34:25.200 God made you all of the various things you are, the attributes 00:34:25.200 --> 00:34:27.040 you have are gifts from God. 00:34:27.040 --> 00:34:30.880 So when you just start denying these things and saying that no, 00:34:30.880 --> 00:34:35.680 I am this self-sufficient island, I stand alone, and I need no 00:34:35.680 --> 00:34:38.000 one else and nothing. 00:34:38.000 --> 00:34:41.680 You are denying the reality of creation, you are denying what God 00:34:41.680 --> 00:34:44.480 created, and you are becoming part of the process. 00:34:45.520 --> 00:34:49.920 You are becoming part of what is destroying civilization all around us. 00:34:49.920 --> 00:34:51.520 And that is what these have in common. 00:34:51.520 --> 00:34:54.800 And of course they have that in common because they have a 00:34:54.800 --> 00:34:59.040 common motivating intelligence else behind them. 00:34:59.040 --> 00:35:04.240 And as I've said before, no, human beings could not form these 00:35:04.240 --> 00:35:08.640 sorts of conspiracies over a course of centuries and orchestrate these things. 00:35:08.640 --> 00:35:11.440 We know historically humans are not very good at working on that 00:35:11.440 --> 00:35:14.800 scale, at least in secret for that long. 00:35:14.800 --> 00:35:16.880 But Satan is. 00:35:16.880 --> 00:35:18.480 And ultimately that 00:35:19.440 --> 00:35:23.120 is the power behind all of these movements, and that's why they 00:35:23.120 --> 00:35:25.040 have a coherent goal. 00:35:25.040 --> 00:35:28.160 That's why they all work toward that goal, because there is actually 00:35:28.160 --> 00:35:29.200 a plan. 00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:31.040 And so you can choose. 00:35:31.040 --> 00:35:35.040 Do you want to be on that side with Satan supporting his 00:35:35.040 --> 00:35:38.080 forces? Or do you want to be on God's side? 00:35:38.720 --> 00:35:41.760 It's a very stark choice and one would think it would be 00:35:41.760 --> 00:35:46.880 an easy choice, but so many today make the choice that no, 00:35:46.880 --> 00:35:50.000 I like these things that the Enlightenment has given me, even though 00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.160 they're cancer answer, in the short run they're pleasant, some of them, 00:35:54.160 --> 00:35:56.240 and so people opt to keep those. 00:35:56.240 --> 00:36:00.160 Instead of asking the hard questions, actually looking at scripture, seeing what 00:36:00.160 --> 00:36:04.560 it is that God says is right and true and good. 00:36:05.200 --> 00:36:10.240 And as Christians, first and foremost, we should be looking to Scripture 00:36:10.240 --> 00:36:14.080 to see what God has said about these things, not looking to 00:36:14.080 --> 00:36:17.760 what the world has done, not looking to what we are told 00:36:17.760 --> 00:36:19.360 is progress. 00:36:19.520 --> 00:36:23.680 A great example of looking to scripture and atomization can be found 00:36:23.840 --> 00:36:29.360 in second Corinthians twelve, where God says for children are not obligated 00:36:29.360 --> 00:36:32.640 to save up for their parents, but parents for their children. 00:36:33.520 --> 00:36:36.240 Now try saying that in a room full of boomers and see 00:36:36.240 --> 00:36:38.560 if you don't get lynched because 00:36:39.760 --> 00:36:40.080 that 00:36:41.120 --> 00:36:46.160 the idea of atomization and individualization, and I got mine, and you 00:36:46.160 --> 00:36:49.200 need to earn her yours and pick yourself up front by your 00:36:49.200 --> 00:36:53.920 bootstraps had become so normal that those are now moral claims. 00:36:53.920 --> 00:36:58.560 It's not simply wisdom, whether it's true or false, but those are 00:36:58.560 --> 00:37:04.960 moral dicta that are given by older generations to younger generations without 00:37:04.960 --> 00:37:08.800 regard to their circumstances, without r th regard to the fact that 00:37:09.040 --> 00:37:14.800 picking yourself up by your bootstraps isn't possible today the way it 00:37:14.800 --> 00:37:16.000 was fifty years ago. 00:37:16.400 --> 00:37:16.560 Well, 00:37:16.560 --> 00:37:19.200 and not only that, it's fundamentally impossible. 00:37:19.200 --> 00:37:21.840 Which is one thing that I think is funny because it came 00:37:21.840 --> 00:37:26.240 over from a German fairy tale, it's Bern Munchausen, and one of 00:37:26.240 --> 00:37:29.280 the the famous stories about him it's it's told in various ways, 00:37:29.280 --> 00:37:34.560 but he saves himself and his horse from quicksand or a muddy 00:37:34.560 --> 00:37:38.240 trap, whatever it happens to be in the particular tail, by pulling 00:37:38.240 --> 00:37:41.040 himself and his horse up by his hair. 00:37:41.040 --> 00:37:43.680 Well, some of them are pulling himself up by his bootstraps. 00:37:43.680 --> 00:37:45.360 That's where we literally get it from. 00:37:45.360 --> 00:37:49.200 It was meant to be something that is literally impossible and it's 00:37:49.200 --> 00:37:53.600 become this phrase in the US that's practically sacrosanct that well no 00:37:53.680 --> 00:37:56.400 you pull yourself up by your boot it's meant to be something 00:37:56.400 --> 00:37:58.000 that is impossible. 00:37:58.000 --> 00:38:01.760 And so there's this great irony that it's used so frequently to 00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:04.160 mean that that somehow this is something you can do if you 00:38:04.160 --> 00:38:05.360 just work hard enough. 00:38:05.360 --> 00:38:08.240 I guess we can all be Baron Munchausen and pull our horse 00:38:08.240 --> 00:38:12.080 out of a muddy puddle by pulling our own hair. 00:38:12.720 --> 00:38:14.080 That's amazing. 00:38:14.080 --> 00:38:18.320 There's a another application of that uh same technique in a different 00:38:18.480 --> 00:38:22.880 uh fairy tale uh Rumpel Stiltskin in the original ending. 00:38:22.880 --> 00:38:27.360 The way he died when she guessed his name was he stamped 00:38:27.360 --> 00:38:29.840 his foot so hard that he got one of his feet stuck 00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:34.000 in his in the ground and he pulled his other foot up 00:38:34.000 --> 00:38:36.880 over his head and tore himself in half and died. 00:38:36.880 --> 00:38:40.080 So when he tried to pull himself up by his bootstraps, that's 00:38:40.080 --> 00:38:41.280 how it actually ends up. 00:38:41.280 --> 00:38:44.400 You end up eviscerated and dead. 00:38:44.400 --> 00:38:46.000 And you know it's 00:38:47.120 --> 00:38:48.400 So atomized. 00:38:48.400 --> 00:38:48.720 As 00:38:49.680 --> 00:38:52.480 Yeah. R return to the dust. 00:38:52.480 --> 00:38:55.600 I guess that was the only biblical part of the whole thing. 00:38:55.680 --> 00:38:56.400 It's 00:38:57.440 --> 00:39:01.120 Yeah, the fact that scripture says the women are to be silent 00:39:01.200 --> 00:39:04.640 and that slaves are to obey their masters and that parents are 00:39:04.640 --> 00:39:06.880 to save up for their children. 00:39:06.880 --> 00:39:09.040 These are counter-cultural things today. 00:39:09.040 --> 00:39:12.080 These are things that will make people so angry that they will 00:39:12.080 --> 00:39:16.400 say you're not Christian simply for quoting scripture. 00:39:16.400 --> 00:39:16.720 And 00:39:18.720 --> 00:39:22.240 The reason we're doing this podcast series, the reason that we're that 00:39:22.240 --> 00:39:25.280 we had spent the money and the time to do any of 00:39:25.280 --> 00:39:30.720 this, was that more and more we saw Christians reacting with visceral 00:39:30.720 --> 00:39:34.400 hatred to the plain words of scripture. 00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:34.720 And 00:39:35.680 --> 00:39:38.720 as we look, like I I've said before, and Corey and I 00:39:38.720 --> 00:39:41.840 have both spent a lot of time reaching out to people who 00:39:41.840 --> 00:39:47.840 are not Christians To explain the world in Christian terms that they 00:39:47.840 --> 00:39:48.800 can understand. 00:39:48.800 --> 00:39:50.160 Yeah, it's funny when the 00:39:51.040 --> 00:39:55.040 communion thing blew up in the last couple weeks, there were at 00:39:55.040 --> 00:39:58.400 least two different one was a not a Lutheran, one wasn't a 00:39:58.400 --> 00:40:01.840 Christian at all, who asked if I could briefly explain what the 00:40:01.840 --> 00:40:03.120 controversy was. 00:40:03.120 --> 00:40:05.840 And in both cases, in like four tweets, which is two hundred 00:40:05.840 --> 00:40:09.520 and eighty characters each, I was able to explain it well enough 00:40:09.680 --> 00:40:13.280 that they said thank you, I understand perfectly what's going on now. 00:40:13.280 --> 00:40:18.480 Now, that sort of clarity of speech and thought and communication should 00:40:18.480 --> 00:40:19.520 be the bare minimum. 00:40:19.520 --> 00:40:22.560 That should be table stakes for any pastor who wants to speak 00:40:22.560 --> 00:40:23.680 on any issue. 00:40:23.680 --> 00:40:27.680 And as Christians, we should be equipped whenever we're speaking about the 00:40:27.680 --> 00:40:31.120 world to speak in such a way that if someone doesn't know 00:40:31.120 --> 00:40:35.680 God and they don't care about God, maybe we can make the 00:40:35.680 --> 00:40:37.520 pragmatic case for God. 00:40:37.520 --> 00:40:38.960 That's not a bad thing. 00:40:38.960 --> 00:40:42.400 To say, you know what, the suffering and the misery in your 00:40:42.400 --> 00:40:46.320 family for the last couple generations, you know, this isn't your opening 00:40:46.320 --> 00:40:48.880 salvo, but at some point you should be able to make the 00:40:48.880 --> 00:40:52.160 point to them that the decay and the misery that you're suffering 00:40:52.480 --> 00:40:55.520 from is due to disobedience to God. 00:40:55.840 --> 00:40:58.880 the fact that the you know grandpa was alcoholic and mom was 00:40:58.880 --> 00:41:04.000 abusive and the kid is now looking at hormone replacement therapy and 00:41:04.000 --> 00:41:05.840 you just found Jesus and you're like 00:41:07.120 --> 00:41:11.600 y once you once those people find Jesus, they understand what was 00:41:11.600 --> 00:41:14.480 missing from all those previous generations. 00:41:14.480 --> 00:41:15.840 But the curse 00:41:16.880 --> 00:41:17.520 of sin 00:41:18.480 --> 00:41:21.920 is baked into the acts of sinfulness. 00:41:21.920 --> 00:41:26.160 The fact that when you do evil, you will typically get walloped 00:41:26.160 --> 00:41:28.480 immediately with the evil consequences. 00:41:28.480 --> 00:41:31.600 There might be a delay of you know a few minutes or 00:41:31.600 --> 00:41:34.800 six months or a year, but you're always going to pay the 00:41:34.800 --> 00:41:36.880 price for whatever evil you do. 00:41:36.880 --> 00:41:41.040 Not just from guilt, and not talking about the eternal price, talking 00:41:41.040 --> 00:41:42.640 about in this life. 00:41:42.640 --> 00:41:45.200 You know, sometimes people can steal stuff and get away with 00:41:46.880 --> 00:41:52.880 Yeah. and temporal consequences are are something that Christians used to believe 00:41:52.880 --> 00:41:56.880 in. It's something that we, you know, Lutherans confess every Sunday when 00:41:56.880 --> 00:41:59.120 we confess our sins. 00:41:59.120 --> 00:42:02.880 But if you don't believe that, how can you explain to someone 00:42:02.880 --> 00:42:06.400 who's not a Christian who's looking at You know, we're sitting in 00:42:06.400 --> 00:42:11.200 the ashes of Christendom, we're seeing everything collapsing around us, and we 00:42:11.200 --> 00:42:12.960 don't understand why. 00:42:12.960 --> 00:42:17.760 And on one hand, like we're not simply saying, Well, yeah, this 00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:21.760 is God punishing us, like that's true, but it's not even it's 00:42:21.760 --> 00:42:25.520 not even close to the most interesting part of what's going on 00:42:25.840 --> 00:42:33.120 because God's punishment is reversible when the sin ends, when Israel 00:42:33.120 --> 00:42:36.480 repented, God stopped chastising them. 00:42:36.480 --> 00:42:38.640 And then they would fall into sin again and they would be 00:42:38.640 --> 00:42:39.600 chastised again. 00:42:39.600 --> 00:42:40.800 And it was a cycle. 00:42:40.800 --> 00:42:42.080 And it's a human cycle. 00:42:42.080 --> 00:42:43.520 It wasn't particular to them. 00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:45.360 It's particular to all of us. 00:42:45.360 --> 00:42:49.040 And what we've seen and what we described in the election episode 00:42:49.120 --> 00:42:51.360 and are continuing here is that 00:42:52.320 --> 00:42:53.520 for Western 00:42:54.480 --> 00:42:59.120 society and civilization, we had an incredibly long, long arc of well 00:42:59.120 --> 00:43:03.520 over a thousand years, where God's blessings were poured out pretty much 00:43:03.520 --> 00:43:09.520 continuously, and we had exponential growth of population in an entirely sustainable 00:43:09.520 --> 00:43:15.040 manner. It wasn't simply ballooning as has happened in Africa and they're 00:43:15.040 --> 00:43:20.560 only kept alive completely artificially by drug and food subsidies that are 00:43:20.640 --> 00:43:22.160 shipped in from outside. 00:43:22.160 --> 00:43:25.920 Their nap natural population is twenty percent or less of what they 00:43:25.920 --> 00:43:27.040 have today. 00:43:27.040 --> 00:43:29.200 And that was not the case in Europe. 00:43:29.200 --> 00:43:32.880 Europe grew as God gave the growth, and we were able to 00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:36.400 continue to feed ourselves despite not having a whole lot of arable 00:43:36.400 --> 00:43:40.880 land through improvements in technology, which are the result of wisdom, which 00:43:40.880 --> 00:43:42.640 are the result of blessing. 00:43:42.640 --> 00:43:46.720 And so Christians shouldn't be afraid afraid of science and we shouldn't 00:43:46.720 --> 00:43:50.000 be afraid of knowledge, but we should because we should understand that 00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:53.920 those good things come from God, but they're gifts. 00:43:53.920 --> 00:43:58.000 Just like if you are given a million dollars from some some 00:43:58.000 --> 00:44:01.840 long dead ant that you didn't know existed, that's a gift from 00:44:01.840 --> 00:44:04.800 God. What kind of person are you after that? 00:44:04.800 --> 00:44:07.680 Are you the kind that goes and blows it all on drugs 00:44:07.840 --> 00:44:10.560 or on fast cars or on gambling? 00:44:10.560 --> 00:44:12.720 Or do you save it away or do you put it to 00:44:12.720 --> 00:44:13.440 work in a church? 00:44:13.440 --> 00:44:16.720 Or you know there's not a right answer, but there are a 00:44:16.720 --> 00:44:18.560 lot of wrong answers. 00:44:18.560 --> 00:44:24.240 And when God gives us gifts, we need to be conscious of 00:44:24.240 --> 00:44:28.160 the fact, one, that they're coming from God, and two, that they're 00:44:28.160 --> 00:44:32.560 not just for us to sit on or to be happy, they're 00:44:32.560 --> 00:44:35.360 for us to be a blessing in the lives of others. 00:44:35.360 --> 00:44:39.040 So if you're given the gift of being able to explain things 00:44:39.040 --> 00:44:43.440 clearly, use that gift to explain important things clearly to people who 00:44:43.440 --> 00:44:44.720 need them explained. 00:44:44.720 --> 00:44:48.800 And if you're not given the gift, please don't try beyond your 00:44:48.800 --> 00:44:52.480 limits. Please find someone who can help explain things so that you 00:44:52.480 --> 00:44:54.800 don't make things worse. 00:44:55.040 --> 00:44:58.480 The gifts that God has given, God will also withdraw. 00:44:58.480 --> 00:45:01.680 You know, we we see this with the weather and we see 00:45:01.680 --> 00:45:02.720 this with famine. 00:45:02.720 --> 00:45:07.120 Scripture is very clear that the storehouses of the winds are controlled 00:45:07.120 --> 00:45:07.840 by God. 00:45:07.840 --> 00:45:11.280 And the fact that today we understand that the sun heats the 00:45:11.280 --> 00:45:15.760 earth's crust and gives rise to currents that rise and fall and 00:45:15.760 --> 00:45:20.240 cause the winds to blow doesn't change the fact that God controls 00:45:20.240 --> 00:45:21.120 the winds. 00:45:21.120 --> 00:45:24.720 There can be both a side. 00:45:24.720 --> 00:45:25.680 Yes. Yeah. 00:45:25.760 --> 00:45:27.440 Just removes it one step. 00:45:27.760 --> 00:45:28.720 Yeah, exactly. 00:45:28.720 --> 00:45:31.360 But that's that's the way God designed the system. 00:45:31.360 --> 00:45:35.360 And that's the system that God is operating and continuing to maintain. 00:45:35.360 --> 00:45:36.000 And I think that 00:45:37.600 --> 00:45:41.440 the reason, one of the reasons that the Enlightenment was so damaging 00:45:41.600 --> 00:45:46.800 was that on one hand our scientific, and the we talked about 00:45:46.800 --> 00:45:49.680 this a little bit a couple weeks ago, but scantia is Latin 00:45:49.680 --> 00:45:51.280 for knowledge. 00:45:51.280 --> 00:45:52.720 It doesn't mean 00:45:53.600 --> 00:45:56.000 truth. That's Veritas. 00:45:56.000 --> 00:45:57.600 Scantia means knowledge. 00:45:57.840 --> 00:46:03.280 Science is the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge is implicitly of truth. 00:46:03.280 --> 00:46:05.520 You can't know something false. 00:46:05.520 --> 00:46:08.560 You can be misled, but you have knowledge. 00:46:08.560 --> 00:46:12.240 If you have knowledge, you have knowledge of a true thing. 00:46:12.240 --> 00:46:17.840 So science properly understood can only ever be right to the degree 00:46:17.840 --> 00:46:19.600 that it understands something. 00:46:19.600 --> 00:46:23.840 And a lot of science involves speculation and hypothesis and proving and 00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:25.680 disproving hypotheses. 00:46:25.680 --> 00:46:30.080 But ultimately the things that we understand about the world, if you 00:46:30.080 --> 00:46:35.200 have a Christian worldview, it's simply laying bare more of what God 00:46:35.200 --> 00:46:36.640 is doing. 00:46:36.640 --> 00:46:41.120 And again, we shouldn't be afraid of thinking and talking in these 00:46:41.120 --> 00:46:44.800 ways because there are people who don't know God, but they know 00:46:44.800 --> 00:46:48.880 science. Maybe they know the crappy modern version of science that's really 00:46:48.880 --> 00:46:52.400 nothing of the sort, but they see some value, at least in 00:46:52.400 --> 00:46:57.840 the historical trajectory of gaining knowledge of the universe. 00:46:57.840 --> 00:47:01.680 If we can only as Christians argue with them and say, well, 00:47:01.680 --> 00:47:04.480 that's not true, that's not true, and have no other explanation for 00:47:04.480 --> 00:47:08.080 anything, we look We look stupid, as Corey said last week. 00:47:08.080 --> 00:47:11.600 You just look dumb because they don't know God, but they know 00:47:11.600 --> 00:47:12.800 that that's nonsense. 00:47:12.800 --> 00:47:16.640 And if you're telling them nonsense in a way that's verifiable to 00:47:16.640 --> 00:47:20.800 them as untrue, they will never listen to you and believe things 00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:23.040 that they don't have knowledge of. 00:47:23.040 --> 00:47:23.920 And so 00:47:26.160 --> 00:47:31.520 the trajectory of God's work in history and the manner in which 00:47:31.520 --> 00:47:35.680 he works in space and time is important to us because 00:47:36.800 --> 00:47:40.800 his wrath ebbs and flows according to our sin and so do 00:47:40.800 --> 00:47:41.760 his blessings. 00:47:41.760 --> 00:47:44.560 And I'm not trying to do, you know, the Jerry Fallwall thing 00:47:44.640 --> 00:47:48.000 of attracti attributing a particular storm to a particular sin. 00:47:48.000 --> 00:47:52.480 I don't necessarily think that's invalid, but I think it's typological. 00:47:52.720 --> 00:47:55.760 there are small and big ways that these things manifest. 00:47:55.760 --> 00:48:00.000 And we're not prophets, we can't correlate these things im without with 00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:01.360 perfect certainty. 00:48:01.360 --> 00:48:06.160 But we can know in general that when things are getting worse, 00:48:06.160 --> 00:48:09.360 as a Christian we need to understand that's chastisement. 00:48:09.360 --> 00:48:12.320 And we have to ask the question, chastisement for what? 00:48:12.560 --> 00:48:17.040 And so we're talking about the ashes of Christendom because we're so 00:48:17.040 --> 00:48:20.560 far down the path of the what that we can't even see 00:48:20.560 --> 00:48:21.040 it anymore. 00:48:21.120 --> 00:48:24.240 We had to we gotta throw this thing in reverse and go 00:48:24.240 --> 00:48:27.840 full blast just to get back to where we can have some 00:48:27.840 --> 00:48:29.840 semblance of Christianity. 00:48:29.840 --> 00:48:33.280 Even while we're still celebrating the liturgy in church and we still 00:48:33.280 --> 00:48:37.600 have the Bible and we're still Christians on Sunday. 00:48:37.600 --> 00:48:40.880 The point we're trying to make is let's be Christians every day, 00:48:40.880 --> 00:48:46.640 not about doing good works for salvation, but about being beacons of 00:48:46.640 --> 00:48:48.480 God's truth in every 00:48:49.680 --> 00:48:51.600 step of your life. 00:48:51.600 --> 00:48:54.560 Because if you're doing that, God will continue to open doors for 00:48:54.560 --> 00:48:57.200 you to be able to explain things to people that would never 00:48:57.200 --> 00:49:00.960 have happened if you don't let people know you're Christian and let 00:49:00.960 --> 00:49:02.640 them know you have something to say. 00:49:02.640 --> 00:49:05.280 And maybe they won't believe you, maybe they'll think it was stupid. 00:49:05.280 --> 00:49:06.080 Who cares? 00:49:06.080 --> 00:49:08.800 I I get called stupid all the time by people who are 00:49:09.040 --> 00:49:11.280 aren't even close to how smart I am and I don't take 00:49:11.280 --> 00:49:11.840 it personally. 00:49:11.840 --> 00:49:13.120 They don't they don't understand. 00:49:13.360 --> 00:49:15.600 That that's that's for the IQ episode. 00:49:15.600 --> 00:49:15.920 But 00:49:16.160 --> 00:49:17.040 you can't 00:49:17.040 --> 00:49:20.480 care you can't care if people don't like you or don't believe 00:49:20.480 --> 00:49:23.520 you. Tell the truth and let that be its own reward and 00:49:23.520 --> 00:49:26.560 you'll be surprised and blessed by who does hear you 'cause it'll 00:49:26.560 --> 00:49:28.720 be someone you didn't even know was listening. 00:49:28.720 --> 00:49:31.520 But we got to talk about these things, frankly, and we got 00:49:31.520 --> 00:49:34.880 to talk about them to people who think we're stupid when we 00:49:34.880 --> 00:49:36.800 say the believe in Jesus. 00:49:36.800 --> 00:49:37.760 That's part of it. 00:49:37.760 --> 00:49:39.200 That's part of being a Christian. 00:49:39.200 --> 00:49:43.280 And modern evangelism is about talking about these things. 00:49:43.680 --> 00:49:43.920 The 00:49:43.920 --> 00:49:50.560 entire project of the Enlightenment essentially was to remove God from everything. 00:49:50.560 --> 00:49:54.560 Because the animating intelligence behind the enlightenment, I would hope, would be 00:49:54.560 --> 00:49:56.560 obvious by now. 00:49:56.560 --> 00:50:01.040 But that was accomplished by redefining knowledge and truth. 00:50:01.840 --> 00:50:07.920 And for centuries it had been the case that the physical sciences, 00:50:07.920 --> 00:50:14.960 the artis servilis, the servile arts, were considered secondary to the artis 00:50:14.960 --> 00:50:19.440 liberalis, the liberal arts, which would include such things as philosophy and 00:50:19.440 --> 00:50:25.920 theology. Theology was originally conceived of as the queen of the sciences. 00:50:25.920 --> 00:50:28.080 It was the pinnacle of human knowledge. 00:50:28.080 --> 00:50:33.440 Everything else flowed from that because that was knowledge of ultimate things, 00:50:33.440 --> 00:50:35.840 ultimate truth, ultimate good. 00:50:36.080 --> 00:50:43.440 And so, insofar as things agreed with truth, they were considered 00:50:43.440 --> 00:50:44.720 useful or good. 00:50:44.720 --> 00:50:50.320 And so science was a method, so developed, in the more modern 00:50:50.320 --> 00:50:54.400 sense of the term, to go about acquiring knowledge that was consistent 00:50:54.400 --> 00:50:56.800 with the good, the beautiful, and the true. 00:50:56.800 --> 00:51:02.320 No However, it is still the case that truth is prior to 00:51:02.320 --> 00:51:06.960 knowledge. What the Enlightenment attempted to do was redefine it so that 00:51:06.960 --> 00:51:12.320 truth is merely the cumulative noun in order to describe it's sort 00:51:12.320 --> 00:51:13.760 of the plural of plurals 00:51:14.720 --> 00:51:16.880 of data, of knowledge. 00:51:16.880 --> 00:51:20.320 And so if you acquire enough data, well that adds up to 00:51:20.320 --> 00:51:22.400 a truth, and that's not how it works. 00:51:22.400 --> 00:51:25.200 Truth is something fundamentally different. 00:51:25.200 --> 00:51:28.160 And so And so what we're talking about here is truth. 00:51:28.160 --> 00:51:33.680 We're talking about ultimate realities, not just a collection of data points 00:51:33.680 --> 00:51:38.480 that give us a pattern and point to something, a probabilistic reality, 00:51:38.480 --> 00:51:40.000 as it were. 00:51:40.960 --> 00:51:45.520 But to go back for a second here to God blessing and 00:51:45.520 --> 00:51:48.880 cursing, because both are of course present in scripture, I thought of 00:51:48.880 --> 00:51:52.800 Jeremiah 18, and so I'll read verses seven through I think ten 00:51:53.120 --> 00:51:53.440 here 00:51:54.960 --> 00:51:58.160 If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, 00:51:58.160 --> 00:52:01.440 that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and 00:52:01.440 --> 00:52:05.760 if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, 00:52:05.760 --> 00:52:08.400 I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to 00:52:08.400 --> 00:52:11.840 it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or 00:52:11.840 --> 00:52:14.880 a kingdom, that I will build and plant it, and if it 00:52:14.880 --> 00:52:18.160 does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I 00:52:18.160 --> 00:52:21.440 will relent of the good that I had intended to do to 00:52:21.440 --> 00:52:26.720 it. Right now we are a bit of both of those, because 00:52:26.720 --> 00:52:30.800 obviously in centuries past we were the kingdom God planted and blessed, 00:52:30.800 --> 00:52:32.880 and we turned from him. 00:52:32.880 --> 00:52:37.600 Now we are the wicked kingdom that God is going to curse, 00:52:37.600 --> 00:52:40.800 and if we turn back to God, of course, He will bless 00:52:40.800 --> 00:52:43.200 us again, in the words of David, I believe that I will 00:52:43.200 --> 00:52:45.840 see the good of the Lord in the land of the living. 00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:50.560 And so if we turn back to God, He will relent of 00:52:50.560 --> 00:52:51.600 the judgment. 00:52:51.600 --> 00:52:53.360 That's just in his word, that's what He promises. 00:52:53.360 --> 00:52:56.800 We believe his word. 00:52:56.800 --> 00:53:00.400 But currently our society is not turning back to God, it is 00:53:00.400 --> 00:53:03.120 doubling down on rejecting him. 00:53:03.120 --> 00:53:06.160 And part of that is because Christians no longer know how to 00:53:06.160 --> 00:53:06.560 talk about 00:53:07.440 --> 00:53:11.840 God, how to actually believe in God and to act as Christians 00:53:11.840 --> 00:53:13.040 out in the world. 00:53:13.040 --> 00:53:15.680 We're Christians, as was said for an hour, an hour and a 00:53:15.680 --> 00:53:18.720 half, three hours, whatever it is on Sunday, for the liturgy and 00:53:18.720 --> 00:53:19.760 Bible study. 00:53:19.760 --> 00:53:21.920 And then we live the rest of our lives. 00:53:21.920 --> 00:53:23.200 That's not how it's supposed to be. 00:53:23.200 --> 00:53:28.160 We are supposed to be Christians twenty four seven our entire lives, 00:53:28.160 --> 00:53:31.760 not just for an hour or two on Sunday. 00:53:32.240 --> 00:53:35.520 So if you apply that frame to the the different time periods 00:53:35.520 --> 00:53:38.960 that I mentioned towards the beginning of the episode, going back to 00:53:38.960 --> 00:53:41.280 the eighties, is that gonna solve this problem? 00:53:41.280 --> 00:53:44.800 You know, when everything's uh pink and lasers? 00:53:44.800 --> 00:53:48.640 No. It there's uh Christianity was already dead at that point. 00:53:48.640 --> 00:53:52.400 It's just that there was less momentum lost than than we're seeing 00:53:52.400 --> 00:53:55.280 now. Going back to the fifties, no better. 00:53:55.280 --> 00:53:56.480 The same problems. 00:53:56.480 --> 00:53:59.200 Because you're already centuries into the Enlightenment. 00:53:59.200 --> 00:54:04.400 You're over a century into the revolution against headship that occurred first 00:54:04.400 --> 00:54:09.360 in the Civil War and then in the uh nineteenth Amendment. 00:54:09.360 --> 00:54:12.480 Going back to the Renaissance doesn't help either because 00:54:13.920 --> 00:54:16.880 even when you get there, the question is what good did they 00:54:16.880 --> 00:54:18.480 have? Why did they have it? 00:54:18.480 --> 00:54:21.360 It's not because they were European, it's not because they were white. 00:54:21.360 --> 00:54:26.080 It's not because they had a monarchy, although that's an improvement. 00:54:26.080 --> 00:54:30.560 It's what God has ordained since we ceased to have his direct 00:54:30.560 --> 00:54:35.840 intervention. What was good about them was that they lived and walked 00:54:35.840 --> 00:54:36.400 with God. 00:54:36.400 --> 00:54:38.880 Now, obviously, there were terrible things that happened then too. 00:54:39.040 --> 00:54:41.680 We're not uh we're not making the error that we're trying to 00:54:41.680 --> 00:54:46.160 condemn here by saying that it was a true, pure golden age 00:54:46.160 --> 00:54:48.320 where only Christianity prevailed. 00:54:48.320 --> 00:54:51.200 Obviously you can work at look at the wars and the famines 00:54:51.520 --> 00:54:54.800 and the things and see that there is chastisement then then as 00:54:54.800 --> 00:54:58.640 well. So the reason that we're highlighting those things and then we 00:54:58.640 --> 00:55:02.480 previously highlighted Rome and Greece is to point to in all of 00:55:02.480 --> 00:55:08.000 these periods, the only good things that we had were because we 00:55:08.000 --> 00:55:10.560 were living in accord with God. 00:55:10.560 --> 00:55:14.320 Yeah, I mentioned uh we talked, I think last week about BLM 00:55:14.400 --> 00:55:19.280 and about their webpage where they talked about attacking slavery, attacking the 00:55:19.280 --> 00:55:23.040 patriarchy, attacking heteronormativity. 00:55:23.360 --> 00:55:27.680 Very interesting, and I forgot to mention it then, but that their 00:55:27.680 --> 00:55:34.560 manifesto was basically a complete inversion of Galatians 328 and 329. 00:55:34.560 --> 00:55:37.680 Got Satan knows scripture. 00:55:37.680 --> 00:55:41.600 Satan when when Satan laid Yeah. 00:55:41.600 --> 00:55:46.560 When Satan laid out his roadmap on the BLML BLM website for 00:55:46.560 --> 00:55:50.480 what he was planning to do in 2020 and beyond, it's no 00:55:50.480 --> 00:55:54.320 coincidence that it reads like Galatians 3:28. 00:55:54.320 --> 00:55:58.160 And when you read that verse, uh there's a tremendous amount to 00:55:58.160 --> 00:55:58.800 unpack there. 00:55:58.800 --> 00:56:01.360 Corey's probably gonna write a book about it pretty soon if he 00:56:01.360 --> 00:56:04.560 finishes if he hasn't run out of ink. 00:56:04.640 --> 00:56:04.960 Well I 00:56:04.960 --> 00:56:06.800 won't I won't run out of ink, thankfully. 00:56:06.800 --> 00:56:07.760 I do have enough of that. 00:56:07.760 --> 00:56:09.920 It's just there's that matter of time. 00:56:09.920 --> 00:56:11.840 If God gives me the time. 00:56:13.280 --> 00:56:17.680 But if you're not looking at scripture, if you're looking at it 00:56:17.680 --> 00:56:23.040 through enlightenment eyes, you're gonna read Galatians 3.28 in a very particular 00:56:23.040 --> 00:56:28.320 way, then no one received it prior to the Enlightenment. 00:56:28.320 --> 00:56:33.520 The way it was received in Christianity, prior to us ceasing to 00:56:33.520 --> 00:56:36.800 believe in God, even while we still call ourselves Christians, what it 00:56:36.800 --> 00:56:38.800 was strictly soteriological. 00:56:38.800 --> 00:56:43.600 It is strictly about how faith saves us and how God acts 00:56:43.600 --> 00:56:48.560 within creation without regard to class, without regard to race, without regard 00:56:48.560 --> 00:56:50.000 to sex. 00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:50.320 And 00:56:51.200 --> 00:56:55.600 the fact that God vertically interacts with us in that way does 00:56:55.600 --> 00:56:59.760 not change the horizontal interactions that we have with each other. 00:57:00.160 --> 00:57:01.520 It's actually an affirmation 00:57:01.520 --> 00:57:02.880 of those. 00:57:02.880 --> 00:57:04.800 Yes. Yeah, it's a good idea. 00:57:04.800 --> 00:57:05.200 Because it's 00:57:05.120 --> 00:57:09.120 using Yeah, it's using real things in order to make an important 00:57:09.120 --> 00:57:11.920 point. If these were all illusory, if these were false, if they 00:57:11.920 --> 00:57:16.640 were not real Then the verse would be either incoherent or useless. 00:57:16.720 --> 00:57:19.360 But it's not because these are all real. 00:57:19.360 --> 00:57:23.120 I've practically memorized it by now, but I'll I'll go ahead and 00:57:23.120 --> 00:57:23.680 pull it up. 00:57:23.680 --> 00:57:26.640 I've got I have logos up in the background, so there 00:57:26.640 --> 00:57:26.960 is neither 00:57:27.200 --> 00:57:30.640 Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no 00:57:30.640 --> 00:57:35.920 male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ. 00:57:36.240 --> 00:57:40.720 And what people latch on to is that one in Jesus Christ. 00:57:40.720 --> 00:57:42.640 Now that's referring to the church. 00:57:42.640 --> 00:57:45.120 That's referring to Christ's bride. 00:57:45.120 --> 00:57:50.480 We are unified through faith as the bride of Christ with our 00:57:50.480 --> 00:57:53.040 head, who is the head of the church. 00:57:53.040 --> 00:57:55.520 That's salvation talk. 00:57:55.520 --> 00:57:58.000 That's not in this life talk. 00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:00.240 We are not all one in this life. 00:58:00.240 --> 00:58:02.400 And that was never God's intention. 00:58:02.400 --> 00:58:05.360 You know whose intention it was to be all one in this 00:58:05.360 --> 00:58:07.680 life? That's the cry of Babel. 00:58:07.680 --> 00:58:10.320 That was what they were saying at the Tower of Babel. 00:58:10.320 --> 00:58:14.320 We will we will show the whole world that we are unified, 00:58:14.320 --> 00:58:17.200 that we can do things that are unthinkable. 00:58:17.840 --> 00:58:19.840 They had technological advancement. 00:58:19.840 --> 00:58:20.880 They had pride. 00:58:20.880 --> 00:58:26.720 And God scattered them by confusing our language specifically so that man 00:58:26.720 --> 00:58:29.200 would no longer be one. 00:58:29.200 --> 00:58:32.400 And today, when you say man is not one, now 00:58:33.280 --> 00:58:40.640 we're not setting Galatians 3.28 against Genesis 9 or 10, 11, 00:58:40.640 --> 00:58:42.560 wherever it is wherever it is, thing nine. 00:58:42.560 --> 00:58:45.440 Anyway, we're not setting against the Tower of Babel. 00:58:45.440 --> 00:58:49.120 We're specifically saying that when God saw that man was trying to 00:58:49.120 --> 00:58:52.640 be one, God saw it was evil. 00:58:52.640 --> 00:58:56.400 It was one of the most profound evils in human history. 00:58:56.400 --> 00:59:00.000 It was probably an evil second only to the flood, because how 00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:05.200 many times does God intervene globally with a curse that affects every 00:59:05.200 --> 00:59:07.440 man? Not often. 00:59:07.440 --> 00:59:11.200 You'll have localized curses, but the flood wiped out all but eight, 00:59:11.200 --> 00:59:14.160 and Babel confused all language for all time. 00:59:14.160 --> 00:59:18.880 Even in heaven, languages are preserved, they're no longer confused. 00:59:18.880 --> 00:59:22.880 In Revelation seven nine and following it talks about how every tongue 00:59:22.880 --> 00:59:23.680 was represented. 00:59:23.680 --> 00:59:25.840 They still had their tongues. 00:59:25.840 --> 00:59:29.520 In heaven we will be able to understand each other, but our 00:59:29.520 --> 00:59:34.320 unique distinctive identities as different races with different languages, we have no 00:59:34.320 --> 00:59:37.120 reason to believe that those won't be preserved. 00:59:37.440 --> 00:59:39.920 Now I think it's important to note when we're talking about this 00:59:40.080 --> 00:59:43.280 that Pentecost didn't undo Babel. 00:59:43.280 --> 00:59:47.440 Pentecost was the fulfillment of Galatians 3:28. 00:59:47.440 --> 00:59:50.320 If you look at it closely, the words that they were speaking 00:59:50.320 --> 00:59:52.960 at Pentecost, they couldn't just understand each other. 00:59:52.960 --> 00:59:55.120 They weren't just sitting around having a conversation. 00:59:55.120 --> 00:59:56.800 What could they understand? 00:59:56.800 --> 01:00:00.800 They understood the gospel, the preaching of the Word of God and 01:00:00.800 --> 01:00:05.360 the announcement of Jesus Christ coming as the Savior is what they 01:00:05.360 --> 01:00:07.680 understood in their own tongues. 01:00:07.680 --> 01:00:09.200 It was salvific. 01:00:09.200 --> 01:00:10.640 It pointed to God. 01:00:10.640 --> 01:00:13.120 It didn't mean that they could order off a Chinese menu even 01:00:13.120 --> 01:00:14.240 though they were Greek. 01:00:14.240 --> 01:00:15.520 That was not the point. 01:00:15.520 --> 01:00:16.800 That was not the gift. 01:00:16.800 --> 01:00:20.560 God did not use Pentecost and he did not use Christianity to 01:00:20.560 --> 01:00:23.600 turn mankind back into one. 01:00:23.600 --> 01:00:27.280 And today to say that will probably get you kicked out of 01:00:27.280 --> 01:00:28.320 even a lot of the Lutheran churches 01:00:29.360 --> 01:00:34.320 because we are again, we're so inculcated in the the Enlightenment viewpoint 01:00:34.560 --> 01:00:36.960 that is fundamentally satanic. 01:00:36.960 --> 01:00:38.800 It is an undoing of Babel. 01:00:38.800 --> 01:00:41.440 It's an undoing of Galatians three hundred twenty eight. 01:00:41.440 --> 01:00:44.880 It's a reversal of the things that God has done and God 01:00:44.880 --> 01:00:49.840 has declared, and it's saying no, humanity will once again be united, 01:00:49.840 --> 01:00:51.200 but not in Jesus. 01:00:51.200 --> 01:00:55.440 When God says we are one in Jesus, that's about faith. 01:00:55.440 --> 01:00:59.600 We are only one in so far as we are the elect. 01:00:59.600 --> 01:01:02.240 We are not one because we're all human. 01:01:02.240 --> 01:01:04.000 That's there's no such thing. 01:01:04.000 --> 01:01:07.840 And that is that's basically the gospel today to most people. 01:01:07.840 --> 01:01:12.080 It's a false gospel from a false God, but it's pres it's 01:01:12.080 --> 01:01:15.440 presented in terms that sound Jesus. 01:01:15.440 --> 01:01:19.840 They sound sorta Christian and even Christians fall for it. 01:01:19.840 --> 01:01:21.840 And then Satan can keep going. 01:01:21.840 --> 01:01:23.440 He can keep marching. 01:01:23.440 --> 01:01:26.640 Because look like we see keep saying, if you fall for one 01:01:26.640 --> 01:01:29.920 trick, if you fall for one lie, you're gonna fall for one 01:01:29.920 --> 01:01:30.880 after another. 01:01:30.880 --> 01:01:35.520 And eventually you're gonna find yourself so far separated from God that 01:01:35.520 --> 01:01:38.240 you won't even realize that you've run out of fuel and that 01:01:38.240 --> 01:01:41.920 you're coasting into the the Atlantic Ocean at four in the morning 01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:43.760 and there's no island for you to land 01:01:43.760 --> 01:01:44.080 on 01:01:45.120 --> 01:01:45.520 speaking of 01:01:46.080 --> 01:01:50.320 lies, when we use Galatians three hundred twenty eight, we should probably 01:01:50.320 --> 01:01:54.080 really use three twenty nine as well, just because it refutes one 01:01:54.080 --> 01:01:59.360 of the most common lies in particularly American Christianity today, and just 01:01:59.360 --> 01:02:04.560 to read that verse, and if you are Christ's, then you are 01:02:04.560 --> 01:02:10.000 Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise, which of course is a 01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:16.560 blunt and complete refutation of Zionism, sometimes called Christian Zionism. 01:02:16.560 --> 01:02:22.160 The Jews aren't chosen, the elect are chosen, and you are amongst 01:02:22.160 --> 01:02:25.440 the elect if you are heirs according to the promised, which is 01:02:25.440 --> 01:02:27.520 to say, if you are in Christ. 01:02:27.520 --> 01:02:30.960 And so really we should make sure to include that verse just 01:02:30.960 --> 01:02:34.320 because it is such an important verse for our context. 01:02:34.320 --> 01:02:36.480 And again it's it's another one of the lies that 01:02:37.680 --> 01:02:43.600 yes, these ethnic distinctions race, these are real things, these do matter. 01:02:43.600 --> 01:02:47.520 But three hundred twenty eight, this part of Galatians is dealing with 01:02:47.520 --> 01:02:53.200 soteriology not not with the physical reality that we live in now, 01:02:53.200 --> 01:02:56.240 not with horizontal relationships. 01:02:56.960 --> 01:02:57.760 Or even where we'll 01:02:57.680 --> 01:02:58.960 be preserved in heaven. 01:02:58.960 --> 01:02:59.120 Because 01:02:59.200 --> 01:03:00.880 now we're not the nations are there. 01:03:01.680 --> 01:03:02.480 Well, because they're good. 01:03:02.640 --> 01:03:05.840 Yeah. The destruction of that which is good is evil. 01:03:05.840 --> 01:03:09.360 And so God is not going to destroy these things because they 01:03:09.360 --> 01:03:12.320 are part of his good creation. 01:03:12.560 --> 01:03:17.760 The nations probably were part of his design from the beginning. 01:03:17.760 --> 01:03:20.880 Perhaps Babel accelerated things? 01:03:20.880 --> 01:03:23.280 We don't know exactly how that worked out, but we know that 01:03:23.280 --> 01:03:27.520 the nations are good because in Revelation they are preserved. 01:03:27.520 --> 01:03:30.560 The kings of the nations will bring the glory of the nations 01:03:30.560 --> 01:03:33.440 into the new heavens and the new earth. 01:03:33.440 --> 01:03:36.480 That means they are preserved, and only that which is good is 01:03:36.480 --> 01:03:41.440 preserved, because there is nothing wicked or evil or wrong in paradise. 01:03:41.440 --> 01:03:45.280 And so we know the nations, the races are good. 01:03:45.440 --> 01:03:48.160 I think we can absolutely say that because the god the command 01:03:48.160 --> 01:03:51.040 that God gave to Abraham and that he reiterated to Noah, or 01:03:51.040 --> 01:03:54.960 sorry, not to Abraham, to Adam and reiterated to Noah, was be 01:03:54.960 --> 01:03:59.440 fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. 01:03:59.440 --> 01:04:02.800 And Babel was about ref refusing to fill the earth. 01:04:02.800 --> 01:04:07.840 Now earth doesn't just mean the Mesopotamian, it means the whole planet. 01:04:07.840 --> 01:04:13.040 And what happens when you move from Mount Ararat to Norway? 01:04:13.040 --> 01:04:16.800 You get pale and you get light eyes because because it's the 01:04:16.800 --> 01:04:20.320 only way that you don't go snowblind, because it's really bright up 01:04:20.320 --> 01:04:23.840 there and there's hardly any sunshine, and you need vitamin D and 01:04:23.840 --> 01:04:24.960 you need to be able to see. 01:04:24.960 --> 01:04:28.320 So you turn into a Norwegian when you move to Norway. 01:04:28.320 --> 01:04:30.560 When you move to Ethiopia, not anymore. 01:04:30.560 --> 01:04:32.000 You get dark skin. 01:04:32.000 --> 01:04:32.960 Yes, yeah. 01:04:32.960 --> 01:04:33.040 That 01:04:33.040 --> 01:04:35.360 was a that was a one-time thing God built in. 01:04:35.680 --> 01:04:36.880 Same for dogs. 01:04:36.880 --> 01:04:40.400 You can't go from a chihuahua back to a golden retriever. 01:04:40.400 --> 01:04:43.520 But from the original breedstock, you could get both. 01:04:43.520 --> 01:04:47.680 Yeah. And so all of the genetic diversity that we observe today 01:04:47.680 --> 01:04:52.720 was preserved in Noah and his sons and their wives. 01:04:52.720 --> 01:04:57.600 And the diversity of the three distinct major nations almost certainly comes 01:04:57.600 --> 01:05:00.480 from the three wives of the major nations Who were they were 01:05:00.480 --> 01:05:02.880 descended from people who were killed in the flood. 01:05:02.880 --> 01:05:05.120 They were descended from people who were different. 01:05:05.120 --> 01:05:07.280 And there'd been about ten generations. 01:05:07.280 --> 01:05:12.320 So there had been time for genetic divergence at that point. 01:05:12.320 --> 01:05:12.640 And 01:05:13.600 --> 01:05:18.320 That filtering and that winnowing and then that expansion through Babel ensured 01:05:18.320 --> 01:05:20.560 that people went where God wanted them to go. 01:05:20.560 --> 01:05:25.200 Acts 1726 says that God appointed the dwelling places of the nations 01:05:25.200 --> 01:05:26.640 and the boundaries. 01:05:26.640 --> 01:05:29.600 God ordained for nations to go to places. 01:05:29.600 --> 01:05:33.760 He ordained for Ethiopians to live in Ethiopia and Norwegians to live 01:05:33.760 --> 01:05:35.360 in Nor Norway. 01:05:35.360 --> 01:05:35.680 And 01:05:37.200 --> 01:05:40.800 the undoing of that is contrary to God's will. 01:05:41.040 --> 01:05:44.800 And yet today it's practically the rallying cry of many of our 01:05:44.880 --> 01:05:49.760 I say churches in the most small C version possible. 01:05:49.760 --> 01:05:53.520 There are pastors who advocate these things, again in view of the 01:05:53.520 --> 01:05:58.080 enlightenment. And so the reason that we're ending this episode about Christendom's 01:05:58.080 --> 01:06:02.160 ashes is that it's not just cultural. 01:06:02.160 --> 01:06:07.200 It's not just about the law and about good behavior in public. 01:06:07.200 --> 01:06:11.040 It's about our ability to even hear the word of God. 01:06:11.040 --> 01:06:15.840 You know, when King Josiah rediscovered the law that had been lost, 01:06:15.840 --> 01:06:19.360 they didn't sit, they hadn't simply lost the part of the Torah, 01:06:19.360 --> 01:06:22.000 they forgot it existed because they weren't looking for it. 01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:25.840 A workman found it in some rubble as they were doing construction 01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:28.960 and said, Hey, look what I found he brought to Hilkiah, and 01:06:28.960 --> 01:06:32.400 when Josiah heard it, he was horrified, and he he rent his 01:06:32.400 --> 01:06:36.160 robes because he knew that even though he was a faithful king 01:06:36.320 --> 01:06:39.920 who had been repairing the temple, and he thought that he was 01:06:39.920 --> 01:06:44.000 observing the law, he realized that not only had he not been 01:06:44.000 --> 01:06:47.280 observing all of it, but he'd forgotten part of it existed. 01:06:47.280 --> 01:06:51.280 And it wasn't his doing, it was father's, his father's and grandfather's 01:06:51.280 --> 01:06:53.520 doing that that had been lost. 01:06:53.520 --> 01:06:55.920 That's where we are at today with scripture. 01:06:56.240 --> 01:06:59.280 But without misplacing it, we have the whole Bible. 01:06:59.280 --> 01:07:00.800 We have as many Bials as we need. 01:07:00.800 --> 01:07:03.440 We're not reading and believing any of the things every single person 01:07:03.440 --> 01:07:03.920 has it in 01:07:03.920 --> 01:07:05.280 his pocket. 01:07:05.280 --> 01:07:10.880 Yes. And yet today we have pastors who hate Corey and me, 01:07:10.880 --> 01:07:13.760 absolutely hate with every fibre of their f being. 01:07:13.760 --> 01:07:16.880 I have never seen them fight any evil in their lives as 01:07:16.880 --> 01:07:20.000 hard as they fight us saying what we're saying on this podcast 01:07:20.080 --> 01:07:22.560 and fighting as hard as they can to he keep you from 01:07:22.560 --> 01:07:23.840 hearing it. 01:07:23.840 --> 01:07:26.480 Now these are men who were trained in the Word of God, 01:07:26.480 --> 01:07:30.800 who have been ordained by our own churches, who were sent forth 01:07:30.800 --> 01:07:34.080 to proclaim the Word, and yet when we say the very same 01:07:34.080 --> 01:07:38.560 things that God says, we're told and they tell the world that 01:07:38.560 --> 01:07:39.840 we're damned. 01:07:39.840 --> 01:07:44.240 That's why we're talking about Christensen Christendom's ashes, because it's not just 01:07:44.640 --> 01:07:46.320 it's not just on TV. 01:07:46.320 --> 01:07:49.840 It's in our own pulpits, and it's in our own churches, and 01:07:49.840 --> 01:07:53.280 in some cases it's in our own hearts, where we have grown 01:07:53.280 --> 01:07:58.240 so cold and so deaf to God's voice that when the master 01:07:58.240 --> 01:08:00.960 speaks the sheep no wrong longer recognize him. 01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:03.520 And that is truly terrifying. 01:08:03.520 --> 01:08:07.200 That is something that we must reverse before we can reverse the 01:08:07.200 --> 01:08:08.480 cultural decline. 01:08:08.480 --> 01:08:11.840 Before we can fix the other things, we need to have faithful, 01:08:11.840 --> 01:08:16.240 faithful preachers preaching faithfully, and they can only do that if they 01:08:16.240 --> 01:08:18.160 believe the whole word of God. 01:08:18.160 --> 01:08:20.640 You need to believe Genesis 1 and 2. 01:08:20.640 --> 01:08:24.800 You need to believe that the world was created in six 24-hour 01:08:24.800 --> 01:08:28.560 days. If you believe anything else, you are cursing God. 01:08:28.560 --> 01:08:31.360 You are calling him a liar, and you were saying you don't 01:08:31.280 --> 01:08:34.080 want anything else that he has, because he's not going to give 01:08:34.080 --> 01:08:35.760 it to you if you call him a liar. 01:08:35.760 --> 01:08:38.080 It's not a it's not an a la carte menu where we 01:08:38.080 --> 01:08:41.360 get to pick and choose which parts of scripture are from God 01:08:41.520 --> 01:08:44.080 and which parts we have better ideas about? 01:08:44.080 --> 01:08:47.280 Every word is from the mouth of God, and to reject any 01:08:47.280 --> 01:08:50.800 of it or to poo poo it or to try to translate 01:08:50.800 --> 01:08:56.560 and interpret it away is to renounce your own salvation, even while 01:08:56.560 --> 01:08:57.600 you confess it. 01:08:57.600 --> 01:09:01.600 And so we're doing this episode in this series because this is 01:09:01.600 --> 01:09:04.000 the chief challenge of our day. 01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:08.160 There won't be any Lutheranism in twenty years if these things continue, 01:09:08.160 --> 01:09:11.760 because our churches are dying, and the boomers who are paying all 01:09:11.760 --> 01:09:13.440 the bills are dying literally. 01:09:13.440 --> 01:09:17.200 Their children are apostate, their grandchildren are obviously apostate. 01:09:17.200 --> 01:09:18.640 There's nobody coming. 01:09:19.520 --> 01:09:21.840 That is God's punishment too. 01:09:21.840 --> 01:09:25.920 The grandfathers were faithless, and so the grandchildren are faithless. 01:09:25.920 --> 01:09:30.720 It may be two different modes of faithlessness, but the result is 01:09:30.720 --> 01:09:31.520 the same. 01:09:31.520 --> 01:09:33.360 And it's a curse from God. 01:09:33.680 --> 01:09:36.160 Yes. And it will keep getting worse. 01:09:36.160 --> 01:09:38.800 You know, there there are big parts of this country where you're 01:09:38.800 --> 01:09:42.000 not only dealing with atheist neighbors, but you're dealing with second and 01:09:42.000 --> 01:09:45.680 third generation atheists where not only were they not baptized, not only 01:09:45.680 --> 01:09:48.240 did they grow up around the church or the word at all, 01:09:48.240 --> 01:09:49.440 but their parents didn't either. 01:09:49.440 --> 01:09:52.800 And in some cases, their grandparents didn't. 01:09:52.800 --> 01:09:58.880 To think that we can preserve the Christian civilization that we inherited 01:09:59.760 --> 01:10:06.320 without the foundation of that civilization is the very definition of insanity. 01:10:06.800 --> 01:10:07.040 In 01:10:07.040 --> 01:10:11.680 some places, we're actually dealing now with Muslim and other neighbors as 01:10:11.680 --> 01:10:14.960 well, which again scripture very clear about this. 01:10:14.960 --> 01:10:17.680 That's a curse from God. 01:10:17.680 --> 01:10:22.080 To have foreigners come into your country and take over your country 01:10:22.320 --> 01:10:24.240 is a curse from God. 01:10:24.240 --> 01:10:29.440 God is used that many times throughout history in order to punish 01:10:29.440 --> 01:10:31.440 an apostate people. 01:10:31.440 --> 01:10:32.800 And we have Or to be 01:10:32.800 --> 01:10:33.280 ruled by 01:10:33.280 --> 01:10:39.280 women. Yes, or women or children directly compared the same. 01:10:39.600 --> 01:10:43.440 Yeah. But we have pastors who say this is a good thing 01:10:43.520 --> 01:10:48.400 that we have oh all this opportunity to outreach to No, being 01:10:48.400 --> 01:10:50.640 cursed by God is not a good thing. 01:10:51.120 --> 01:10:54.880 I I can't believe we even have to say that, and yet 01:10:55.200 --> 01:10:58.320 people no longer see that this is a curse from God. 01:10:58.320 --> 01:11:02.880 I'm not saying you don't proselytize those who are not of the 01:11:02.880 --> 01:11:04.080 same race as you. 01:11:04.080 --> 01:11:05.520 Of course not. 01:11:05.520 --> 01:11:11.440 What?, as Europeans, took Christendom to the entire rest of the world, 01:11:11.440 --> 01:11:15.920 with the sole exception being a tiny part of the Levant and 01:11:15.920 --> 01:11:20.560 a church in India, and of course Ethiopia, which had things for 01:11:20.560 --> 01:11:23.840 other historical reasons we've touched on that in other episodes. 01:11:23.840 --> 01:11:27.040 That is the reason Satan hates us, of course. 01:11:27.040 --> 01:11:31.360 Because we built Christendom and then we took the gospel to everyone 01:11:31.360 --> 01:11:36.000 else. That is how you do it, because that is how you 01:11:36.000 --> 01:11:36.960 are blessed by God. 01:11:36.960 --> 01:11:39.920 God will bless you if you are faithful in that way. 01:11:39.920 --> 01:11:45.520 Having your nation invaded by foreigners is not an opportunity, it is 01:11:45.520 --> 01:11:47.920 a curse. 01:11:48.240 --> 01:11:51.360 And it's an act of war, and both must be responded to 01:11:52.080 --> 01:11:54.880 in the so called left and the right hand kingdoms of God. 01:11:56.160 --> 01:11:58.880 One other point I want to make about culture, because I don't 01:11:59.040 --> 01:12:02.080 you know we'll we're gonna do an episode soon about Jews and 01:12:02.080 --> 01:12:07.280 Judaism, but a lot of times you will find even fairly good 01:12:07.280 --> 01:12:10.480 pastors use the term Judeo Christian. 01:12:10.480 --> 01:12:14.400 You know, we're talking about culture and ethics is sort of implied 01:12:14.480 --> 01:12:14.880 in that. 01:12:14.880 --> 01:12:18.640 And so you'll talk you'll hear people talk about the Judeo Christian 01:12:18.880 --> 01:12:24.080 roots of our laws or of our culture of our ethics. 01:12:24.080 --> 01:12:25.600 That's a brand new term. 01:12:25.600 --> 01:12:30.080 That term was invented after Jews started showing up in the United 01:12:30.080 --> 01:12:33.920 States because this is one of the places where they began to 01:12:33.920 --> 01:12:35.360 integrate and they wanted 01:12:36.320 --> 01:12:40.000 to not be treated as outsiders. 01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:41.360 And how do you do that? 01:12:41.360 --> 01:12:44.080 You co-opt the existing population. 01:12:44.080 --> 01:12:46.160 You say, Oh, you you guys are Christian? 01:12:46.400 --> 01:12:46.960 we're Jews. 01:12:47.120 --> 01:12:48.560 You're we're Judeo Christian. 01:12:48.560 --> 01:12:49.680 It it's it's the same thing. 01:12:49.680 --> 01:12:51.680 It's two sides of the same coin, guys. 01:12:51.680 --> 01:12:53.520 You got your religion from us. 01:12:53.520 --> 01:12:56.320 We had it first and then we gave it to you. 01:12:56.320 --> 01:12:58.800 Which is pure nonsense and pure blasphemy. 01:12:59.120 --> 01:13:03.120 As we've said before, Adam believed in the promise of the Christ 01:13:03.120 --> 01:13:05.520 given to him in Genesis three fifteen. 01:13:05.520 --> 01:13:06.880 That's Christianity. 01:13:06.880 --> 01:13:08.800 Noah believed the same promise. 01:13:08.800 --> 01:13:10.960 Abraham received believed the same promise. 01:13:10.960 --> 01:13:14.640 Thomas and his faith was counted to him, like was accor accorded 01:13:14.640 --> 01:13:15.920 to him. 01:13:15.920 --> 01:13:19.840 Everyone who's in heaven is Christian. 01:13:19.840 --> 01:13:24.960 Some of them were also Jews, not because of the so called 01:13:24.960 --> 01:13:29.440 Jewish faith, but because they had the Christian faith within the Jewish 01:13:29.440 --> 01:13:31.840 tradition. Now this is a point that we'll make more clearly. 01:13:31.840 --> 01:13:34.560 I'm it's I'm not gonna make a good case for it now, 01:13:34.560 --> 01:13:39.280 but it is fundamentally subversive when someone says Judeo-Christian. 01:13:39.280 --> 01:13:43.280 What they are doing is they are advancing the enlightenment because there's 01:13:43.280 --> 01:13:46.240 a whole lot of Judeo going on TV right now. 01:13:46.240 --> 01:13:51.360 When you see transsexuals and you see transgender surgeries for children, that's 01:13:51.360 --> 01:13:53.840 the Judeo and Judeo Christian. 01:13:53.840 --> 01:13:58.320 We've all seen the the the terrifying, horrifying pictures of books being 01:13:58.320 --> 01:14:01.040 burned in Germany in the 1930s. 01:14:01.040 --> 01:14:03.600 Nobody tells you what those books were that they were burned, or 01:14:03.600 --> 01:14:05.520 if they tell you, they say, Oh yeah, those they're burn them 01:14:05.600 --> 01:14:07.520 Bibles. Those guys hated God. 01:14:07.520 --> 01:14:11.920 No. The books that they were burning, specifically burning in those literal 01:14:11.920 --> 01:14:17.440 pictures, were from Magnus Hirschfeld's disease emporium. 01:14:17.440 --> 01:14:21.840 They were the original transgender surgery materials. 01:14:21.840 --> 01:14:28.080 They were the original material about homosexuality and sodomy and transgenderism and 01:14:28.080 --> 01:14:32.240 how to spread this filth and this evil in the West. 01:14:32.240 --> 01:14:36.560 When you hear wa about Weimar Germany, the period that happened before 01:14:36.560 --> 01:14:40.880 the thirties, and you hear about the cultural decay and the depravity, 01:14:40.880 --> 01:14:42.800 that's what they're talking about. 01:14:42.800 --> 01:14:47.600 What happened in the 30s was a collective political response from the 01:14:47.600 --> 01:14:53.360 German people in opposition to the terrible societal decay that they had 01:14:53.360 --> 01:14:54.640 been exposed to. 01:14:54.640 --> 01:14:58.240 And it was the Judeo half of Judeo Christianity that was doing 01:14:58.240 --> 01:14:58.800 all that. 01:14:58.800 --> 01:15:01.680 There were no Christians involved at any point. 01:15:01.680 --> 01:15:04.000 You know, as I I mentioned recently in the episode where we 01:15:04.000 --> 01:15:08.400 mentioned head coverings, it was a Jew who told churches to burn 01:15:08.400 --> 01:15:11.040 their veils and we all responded. 01:15:11.040 --> 01:15:14.560 And now fifty years later, it's uh it's nearly unthinkable in most 01:15:14.720 --> 01:15:18.000 churches for a girl to wear a veil, let alone for us 01:15:18.000 --> 01:15:21.520 to say you should veil, let alone you must veil. 01:15:21.520 --> 01:15:22.880 That wasn't Christian. 01:15:22.880 --> 01:15:27.600 That was the Judeo half of that so called two sides to 01:15:27.600 --> 01:15:28.880 one coin. 01:15:28.880 --> 01:15:33.040 There's a clear and marked difference in the God that we worship 01:15:33.040 --> 01:15:34.880 and the God that they worship. 01:15:34.880 --> 01:15:37.280 They worship the God of the Enlightenment. 01:15:37.280 --> 01:15:39.520 They worship the prince of this world. 01:15:39.520 --> 01:15:41.760 We worship the one true God. 01:15:41.760 --> 01:15:46.480 And the fruits of the two opposing religions could not be more 01:15:46.480 --> 01:15:49.440 clear. That's the reason we're gonna do an episode on that. 01:15:49.440 --> 01:15:51.600 You may hear this and think that we're just the most evil 01:15:51.600 --> 01:15:52.720 people in the world. 01:15:52.720 --> 01:15:54.880 You know, i if you don't hate us enough that you can 01:15:54.880 --> 01:15:57.600 listen to the future episode where we go into depth on it, 01:15:57.600 --> 01:16:00.400 you can either really hate us or you can say, Well, yeah, 01:16:00.400 --> 01:16:02.720 I I don't like how that sounds, but I gotta think about 01:16:02.720 --> 01:16:04.240 it because they made some points. 01:16:04.240 --> 01:16:05.040 It's funny. 01:16:05.040 --> 01:16:08.960 Every time somebody posts on Reddit or somewhere else about listening to 01:16:08.960 --> 01:16:11.040 this, that's frequently the claim. 01:16:11.040 --> 01:16:13.840 I either I hate those guys, but they made some really good 01:16:13.840 --> 01:16:16.400 points, or I Or I want to hate them, but I can't 01:16:16.560 --> 01:16:18.800 because they made some really good points. 01:16:18.800 --> 01:16:21.360 Or I want to disagree with what they said, but it all 01:16:21.360 --> 01:16:22.400 makes sense. 01:16:22.400 --> 01:16:25.760 That's the reason that people are terrified of you listening to us. 01:16:25.760 --> 01:16:27.920 We're not playing rhetorical games. 01:16:28.000 --> 01:16:31.760 Corey and I could both run circles around people rhetorically. 01:16:31.760 --> 01:16:35.200 We speak clearly precisely to avoid that. 01:16:35.200 --> 01:16:37.360 It's easy to deceive someone. 01:16:37.360 --> 01:16:40.480 It's hard to tell someone the truth, especially in this day and 01:16:40.480 --> 01:16:42.080 age. And so 01:16:43.040 --> 01:16:46.240 there are people who go around, some of them have callers on, 01:16:46.240 --> 01:16:48.720 who say the word deceivers. 01:16:48.720 --> 01:16:53.040 Well, if saying the very words that God says the way that 01:16:53.040 --> 01:16:58.320 God intended them is deception in your religion, you know, I'm not 01:16:58.320 --> 01:17:00.400 going to be in the same line as you on Judgment Day. 01:17:00.400 --> 01:17:02.000 That's all I can say. 01:17:02.000 --> 01:17:02.320 But 01:17:03.600 --> 01:17:07.760 to get back to the theme of this episode, Christendom's ashes are 01:17:07.760 --> 01:17:09.040 not just cultural. 01:17:09.040 --> 01:17:11.200 And they're not just religious either. 01:17:11.200 --> 01:17:14.960 Because as we've said in past episodes, you don't have to be 01:17:14.960 --> 01:17:18.240 Christian to live a godly life. 01:17:18.240 --> 01:17:21.600 We've seen that for the past couple generations, and that's precisely by 01:17:21.680 --> 01:17:26.080 people have been deceived into thinking you don't need Christianity to have 01:17:26.080 --> 01:17:31.120 a good life, because they were coasting on the fumes of Christendom. 01:17:31.120 --> 01:17:35.680 They were coasting on the fumes of morals and laws and society 01:17:36.240 --> 01:17:40.720 that was explicitly and openly and unapologetically Christian. 01:17:40.720 --> 01:17:44.400 And when those supports got knocked out, there was still some momentum 01:17:44.400 --> 01:17:46.480 left in the thing. 01:17:46.480 --> 01:17:51.600 So you don't have to believe in God to do godly things, 01:17:51.600 --> 01:17:55.680 but you cannot do godly things in the long term if you 01:17:55.680 --> 01:17:57.440 don't know where they come from. 01:17:57.440 --> 01:18:01.440 Because soon as somebody else comes along with a better idea or 01:18:01.440 --> 01:18:04.880 some new progressive solution for a problem you didn't even know you 01:18:04.880 --> 01:18:07.040 have, eventually you're gonna fall for it. 01:18:07.040 --> 01:18:09.200 Or your neighbor will fall for it and so you'll try it 01:18:09.200 --> 01:18:11.200 out because you don't wanna you know you don't wanna ro roke 01:18:11.280 --> 01:18:12.800 the rock the boat. 01:18:12.800 --> 01:18:18.800 And you will ultimately inevitably lose the godly things, as every civilization 01:18:18.800 --> 01:18:19.920 in history did. 01:18:20.160 --> 01:18:24.880 We mentioned at the beginning, Greece and Rome and China, they lost 01:18:24.880 --> 01:18:26.080 God after Babel. 01:18:26.720 --> 01:18:29.600 And they were on the downslope, which is why the the the 01:18:29.840 --> 01:18:31.840 cultures and societies collapsed. 01:18:31.840 --> 01:18:35.200 Chinese art three thousand years ago is better than it was twenty 01:18:35.360 --> 01:18:36.400 five hundred years ago. 01:18:36.400 --> 01:18:39.360 And two thousand years ago, there was a downslope and then it 01:18:39.360 --> 01:18:40.640 started to get better. 01:18:40.640 --> 01:18:44.960 And it was for other reasons, but they were coasting on the 01:18:44.960 --> 01:18:47.520 fumes of a religion that was no longer theirs. 01:18:47.520 --> 01:18:50.960 And that's what we're doing today as the Western world. 01:18:50.960 --> 01:18:56.320 And we need to point to the truth underlying all the reasons 01:18:56.320 --> 01:18:57.440 that we do things. 01:18:57.440 --> 01:19:01.600 Otherwise we cannot possibly repair the damage, let alone explain to people 01:19:01.600 --> 01:19:04.640 why things are going wrong in the first place. 01:19:05.200 --> 01:19:10.800 The moral law is written in the heart of every man. 01:19:10.800 --> 01:19:14.400 However, we have run this experiment. 01:19:14.400 --> 01:19:19.040 We know what happens if you have over a course of generations 01:19:19.120 --> 01:19:22.720 and it may be many generations, or it may be only a 01:19:22.720 --> 01:19:26.000 few. Look at the sons of Ham, it did not take very 01:19:26.000 --> 01:19:29.600 long. Look at the sons of Shem and Japheth, it took longer, 01:19:29.600 --> 01:19:32.640 but eventually it may not be you, you may not be the 01:19:32.640 --> 01:19:35.600 one who loses the moral law. 01:19:35.600 --> 01:19:40.320 It may be your great, great, great, great, great grandchild, or even 01:19:40.640 --> 01:19:42.960 farther in the distance. 01:19:42.960 --> 01:19:48.720 However, it will eventually be lost because you lost the actual foundation, 01:19:48.720 --> 01:19:52.480 the actual truth, you lost Christendom. 01:19:52.480 --> 01:19:57.120 You lost God's favor, and you are running on the fumes. 01:19:57.120 --> 01:19:59.760 And so it is only a matter of how long and how 01:19:59.760 --> 01:20:04.240 far you manage to make it, but you are going to crash. 01:20:04.240 --> 01:20:06.000 And that is what we want to restore. 01:20:06.000 --> 01:20:06.640 We want to restore 01:20:07.680 --> 01:20:11.040 Christendom because that is the only way to get out of the 01:20:11.040 --> 01:20:13.600 dive in which we find ourselves. 01:20:13.600 --> 01:20:18.160 And so yes, there may have been virtuous pagans, because they had 01:20:18.160 --> 01:20:20.960 the moral law written in their heart. 01:20:20.960 --> 01:20:25.520 But there will always be that competition against it because there's Satan 01:20:25.520 --> 01:20:28.160 out there who wants to steal that from you. 01:20:28.160 --> 01:20:31.200 There's your neighbor who wants to try something new and novel, or 01:20:31.200 --> 01:20:34.720 something a demon told him in the woods, in the case for 01:20:34.720 --> 01:20:39.840 many pagans, historically, and eventually that will take over. 01:20:39.840 --> 01:20:41.920 Because you are not fighting against it. 01:20:41.920 --> 01:20:44.800 And Christians today we have the tools to fight against it. 01:20:44.800 --> 01:20:45.520 We have God's word. 01:20:45.680 --> 01:20:47.040 Word. We have it everywhere. 01:20:47.040 --> 01:20:48.320 I have it on my computer right now. 01:20:48.320 --> 01:20:49.120 It's on my phone. 01:20:49.120 --> 01:20:52.720 I have multiple Bibles on my desk. 01:20:52.720 --> 01:20:56.000 But if we don't read these things, if we don't use them, 01:20:56.000 --> 01:20:59.440 if we don't actually speak the words God has spoken to us, 01:20:59.440 --> 01:21:01.680 then all of that does nothing for us. 01:21:01.680 --> 01:21:03.760 We may as well have lost it in a wall in a 01:21:03.760 --> 01:21:08.560 run down temple, like the Jews did at one point. 01:21:08.560 --> 01:21:12.160 God has given us his word. 01:21:12.160 --> 01:21:15.680 We do not have the luxury or the option to ignore the 01:21:15.680 --> 01:21:19.360 things he has said, and, as said before, to a la carte, 01:21:19.360 --> 01:21:22.320 pick the bits we like and leave the rest. 01:21:22.320 --> 01:21:25.840 Everything God has said is true and good, and we have to 01:21:25.840 --> 01:21:28.880 hold to every single word of it. 01:21:28.880 --> 01:21:31.520 And that is quite simply our goal here. 01:21:31.520 --> 01:21:34.880 Our goal is to be true to Scripture. 01:21:34.880 --> 01:21:37.920 One because we are Christians and that is our duty. 01:21:37.920 --> 01:21:42.160 Two because we have taken up the task of teachers, and the 01:21:42.160 --> 01:21:45.520 stricter judgment does await, and so no, we are not going to 01:21:45.520 --> 01:21:47.920 lie or deceive or play rhetorical games. 01:21:47.920 --> 01:21:49.440 We're not going to do that. 01:21:49.760 --> 01:21:53.280 Because we will be called to account for every idle word. 01:21:53.280 --> 01:21:56.320 And we know that, so we are going to speak the truth 01:21:56.480 --> 01:22:03.120 in the way God has spoken it to us in his word. 01:22:03.120 --> 01:22:03.520 Amen