Sweet Social Justice

What social justice has done in our culture, it has taken this

Marxist understanding of the world, this worldview of victimhood, and pressed that across every point of difference that you can imagine.

How is this being implemented in the churches? How is this penetrating the church to become the economic ideal?

It's through basically what I call the baptism of Marxism.

And one of the chief proponents of that in today's church is Tim Keller. And I saw the title of it was

Woke Church. This was the name of the sermon. It was preached by Dr. Eric Mason, who lives and ministers in the same city where I ministered from 2004 to 2016, inner city

Philadelphia. In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

So herein is the issue with social justice. A rejection of the authority of God's word in favor of what is right in my own eyes.

What I feel, what I think, what I believe. But by what standard is prostitution wrong?

By what standard is any manner of sexual sin wrong? Father.

So Samson was a judge used of God. And there was something particularly masculine about Samson's role.

To grab a jawbone of a donkey and destroy Philistines was a particularly masculine role.

To pick up the gate, the iron gate, and carry it a far distance. And then to overcome the enemy time and again, this was a particularly masculine role.

But you say, wait a minute, wasn't there a female judge in Israel? And her name was

Deborah. Lord, it is so good to come before you and to open your word and to pray, to seek your face, to gather, and also to discuss things that are going on in the culture.

Lord, we know that you love the world so much that you gave your one and only son. And we pray that we would be a light to the world.

That we would reflect the light of Christ to a lost world that's scrambling and doesn't know.

Up from down, right from left, bitter from sweet. And we pray, Lord God, that tonight we would have clarity.

That we'd be able to discuss these things and really identify what social justice is and what the danger it poses to the church and to the world.

So Lord, be with us in this conversation tonight. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So we'll begin, if you have your scriptures with you, you can turn to Judges chapter 13.

You can also look that up on your smartphone device or you're more than welcome just to listen. I'm only going to read a few verses tonight and we'll focus in on those.

But beginning with Judges 13, this is the familiar story of Samson. We know that they were unable to have children,

Manoah and his wife, until an angel appeared and that angel of the Lord probably is

Christ himself. Pre -incarnate, making a kind of a theophany, an appearance of God in the

Old Testament. But when this angel appears, he says something interesting in verse 4.

Calling the child that will be born to Manoah and his wife a Nazarite. He will be a Nazarite.

Though the woman is told, therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean.

Mark that. For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a

Nazarite, to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the

Philistines. So, of course, we know the story of Samson. And he's born and he has just extraordinary, supernatural strength.

I mean, he can lift up an iron gate and carry it a great distance. He has power from God. So Samson also has long hair because no razor was ever taken to his head.

Well, when he was young, there came a time when a young lion came running out of the woods to attack him.

And the Bible tells us here in chapter 14 that when this lion attacked Samson, he took it as one tears a young goat.

Now, that puzzles me because I don't know how one tears a young goat. I would never tear a young goat.

That sounds pretty extreme. But he took a lion and treated it like it was a goat and tore it apart and killed it and left the carcass.

Some time passed and he came back. When he got there, he found that the carcass of this lion was now filled with bees.

And the bees had made a honeycomb in the carcass of the lion. So there was honey in the lion.

Remember the Nazarite vow. You shall eat nothing unclean.

Now, a dead animal is unclean. And honey from the carcass is unclean. We noticed this early in Judges 13 that it's repeated a couple of times so that the author here is setting us up to recognize eat nothing unclean.

And right away, what does Samson do? He takes and eats. The honey from the honeycomb is symbolic and can be applied to the rejection of God's Word.

The revelation of God. The Nazarite vow. Eat nothing unclean. Let nothing, no shaving of your head.

All of this was the revelation of God that Samson was to live by. Rejecting that, he ate.

But the interesting thing is he then took some of that honey. I assume he put it in a pot or something. He might have just had a dripping handful of honey.

I don't know. But he brought it to his parents. And he gave it to them to eat.

And it tasted sweet. They had no idea because we're told in chapter 14, verse 9, he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey from the carcass of the lion.

Social justice is like Samson's honey. It tastes so sweet.

Many people think it's nothing more than to show love to an orphan, and a widow, or a migrant, or the poor.

That's sweet. There's no one who could argue with being loving and kind towards the poor.

Or to the orphan, or the widow, or the migrant. The quartet of the vulnerable, as they've been called.

But social justice is something more. Where did that honey come from? What are the roots of social justice?

We will be exploring that in this course. Short answer. Social justice.

Here's the definition. It is the elevation of self to godhood through the elimination of disparities that would hinder the quest to absolute self -autonomy.

There's a lot in that definition, so let's break that down. It's the elevation of self. It's a person who's putting themself in the place of God.

How do they do that? Well, there's a quest to eliminate any disparities in society.

Disparities, differences, points of difference that might give one person an advantage over another.

The end goal being that a person controls their own destiny. You see, so much of what determines what we have in life, let's say wealth, is determined before we're born.

If I'm born in America, it's because God chose that I'd be born in America and not in a slum in Africa, in a particular slum in Nairobi, let's say.

This is the sovereign plan of God. He determines the boundaries of a person. So many of the things that define who we are are determined by God.

A sovereign God decrees the things that come to be, but social justice will have nothing of the sovereignty of God.

A person must be allowed to determine their own destiny, and so every difference and every disparity needs to be eliminated.

So, the highest goal of this is equality, equity.

Equity becomes the highest goal. That becomes the defining God of social justice.

That's what people are after. Now, it's kind of vague at this point, so let's get a little bit more particular. Let's push this down into kind of flesh and bones.

What are the things that differentiate people from one another? Well, there's the level of wealth, economics.

There's race, there's gender, there's sexuality, there's nationality. All of these things are points of difference, and as the

Industrial Revolution came about in the early 1800s, there was a heightened awareness of the difference between, quote -unquote, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Who coined those terms? Marx. Karl Marx, noticing those differences, said that there is fundamentally an oppressive class which is holding down a victim class.

The rich versus the poor. And that construct of Marxism necessarily defined people according to either a victim status or an oppressor status.

What social justice has done in our culture, it has taken this

Marxist understanding of the world, this worldview of victimhood, and pressed that across every point of difference that you can imagine.

So here's the definition of social justice. Cultural Marxism. It's Marxism applied to race.

That it is fundamentally, by virtue of nothing more than the amount of melanin in a person's skin, it is fundamentally oppressive to be white.

Yes. And there's even new definitions we can get into when we talk about race, about what whiteness is.

It's not as you would think. It's a whole new definition of what whiteness is. Or we could talk about economics.

There's still the old classical economic differentiation, rich versus poor. The rich are oppressing the poor, and that's why the poor are poor.

Sexuality. The heterosexual is oppressing the homosexual.

Necessarily. It's assumed. And you can talk about gender. Women are oppressed by men.

Nationality. Build the wall. That's racist. Walls are racist. The very idea of having nation -states is even being called into question in our day and age.

So there is a fundamental victim -oppressor construct that's being built.

Now, I was at a conference down in Atlanta. It's called Social Justice and the Gospel. And there were these great speakers that I admire very much.

And I noticed that the number of people that were attending this conference paled in comparison to the larger conference that was dealing with other issues.

Very few people were interested in this question of social justice. So one day I was walking around.

That conference had ended, and now it was just a larger conference no longer talking about social justice.

But I got in a conversation with a young guy who was about to plant a church in the inner city. And I asked him, well, what did you think about that social justice conference?

He said, eh, I didn't go to it. I'm not really interested. I don't really understand what the big deal is.

And I said, I'll tell you what the big deal is. I was an inner city missionary from 2014 to 2016.

And by God's grace, and only by His grace, we saw more than 100 people come to faith and get baptized.

In those years, people were coming and getting saved and growing in the church. And I look back on that experience now, and I can count 12 people who profess faith in Christ who have now apostatized, who have turned away from the faith.

And every single one of them left the faith because of social justice. Now, two of them left for Islam, but they didn't turn to Muhammad because they read his teachings and found them compelling.

They turned because in prison, getting locked up for a crime, they were told that Christianity is colonial racism.

That the white man, those white missionaries that came to Kensington, indoctrinated you in the white man's religion and turned them to Islam based on the color of skin.

Identifying as victims of the white man, they then turned to Islam. Others went off to college.

And some of the ones who went to college, one of them began dating a social justice warrior. And before long, she turned and completely abandoned the faith for the same kind of reasons.

That Christianity, the Western colonial Christianity, is a fundamentally oppressive regime.

And so social justice attacks the very root of Christianity. And I could go on and on about the different stories.

Some of them left because of lesbianism. Recognizing that it was the church that was holding them back from their true created design.

They identified as victims and turned away from the faith they were taught when they were teenagers. Over and over again, we've seen this story.

And I look back on the years when I was a youth pastor in the suburbs from 2000 to 2003. And many of those who came to faith and were baptized at that time are still walking with the

Lord. But the ones who aren't seem to have found a different religion. And this is the point.

Social justice has become a religion. It's a religion.

It's a religion that has not so much a God, but an anti -God.

The devil in the social justice religion is this nebulous thing called hate.

And they see it everywhere. And to be born again in the social justice world is not to experience new birth through Christ.

It's to become woke. Wokeness is like being born again to a social justice warrior.

Eyes open to see a reality just beneath the surface that they never recognized before. All of a sudden, they can see.

Social justice has a born again fake experience. And there's many other parallels that we'll get into next week that equate social justice to a form of religion and what's becoming the majority religion of this country.

Where does this lead? How pervasive is it? In the culture, it leads to the destruction of a society.

Marxism, wherever it takes root, think Venezuela. And we should care about human flourishing.

We should care about people. The degree to which this country turns in a socialist direction, a social justice direction, will be its undoing.

But we should care even more in the church because social justice is coming into the church like a tidal wave, taking over entire denominations.

Entire denominations. When I was a youth pastor, I was in a PCUSA church, Presbyterian Church USA.

In 2013, they would not admit the song in Christ alone into their hymnal because it teaches substitutionary atonement.

The wrath of God is satisfied because of that line, they would not admit this great modern hymn.

It's funny with hymns, by the way. My kids think that these songs that we grew up singing are hymns because it's a hymn to them.

They were born after they were written. So in Christ alone is an old hymn to them. But all it teaches is the old, old story.

Christ and his blood shed for sinners. The wrath of God satisfied as a penalty was poured out on the

Son of God. Social justice hates the blood of Christ. It hates substitutionary atonement.

It teaches the opposite. See, if I am responsible for my sin, born in Adam's race, and I'm a sinner who's turned my back on God, I need a

Savior. And when he grants me salvation, I live from a position of gratefulness, being thankful for the things that were given to me in Christ.

You can look at the world and say, kind of like Dave Ramsey does, you know, the great financial guy.

Whenever someone calls in, how are you, what does he say? Better than I deserve. Or you can take the exact opposite and identify as a victim.

I've been dealt a bad hand. Society is against me. And this religion of social justice destroys the soul.

And it blinds eyes. Ironically, those who are woke are blinded to their need for grace.

Rather than looking to a Savior, they're looking for a society to come and rescue.

Societal change. I'm here with Timothy Kaufman, who's flown up to join us from Huntsville, Alabama.

Timothy is a writer, apologist, author, writes for the Trinity Review.

And that's where I was first exposed to your work and appreciated what you did. You know, I gave you a phone call,

Timothy, and told you about this project that we're doing called Sweet Social Justice, where we're looking at social justice and sweet meaning deceptively sweet.

And I gave you a call and told you what we were working on and offered to come down and visit you in Huntsville, Alabama to get a quick interview.

I was going to be in the vicinity anyway. And instead, you told me that you would be willing to come up and spend some time with us here.

So last night, we recorded a two -hour presentation and we are entitling it

The Religion of Marx, The Bad News of the

Kingdom of Men. We will make that available. But what we want to do today is just introduce you.

And I wanted to ask you a couple of questions to help us with this project, Sweet Social Justice.

See, my theory is that behind social justice is

Father Marx. Marx wedded with Roman Catholicism and the teachings of Tapperelli.

And we'll get into that in different parts of this movie. But Marxism is kind of the root.

And the root can be exposed in different areas of culture. So wherever there are differences between people, this idea that there is a victim class and an oppressor class, whether the issue be race, gender, sexuality, nationality, being able -bodied or not able, being disabled, in any of these cases, this construct of oppression where one is the oppressor and the other is the victim.

And this victimization is assumed at many points. This is the essence of social justice.

And so what I wanted to do with you today, Timothy, based on the work that you've done with the Trinity Review and since we're so blessed that you, of your own accord, flew up here to work with us,

I want to ask you two questions. Number one, just to clarify for all those watching, what is

Marxism? And then number two, where do you see it entering into the church?

Where do you see Marxism through social justice as an ideology? Where do you see that entering into the evangelical church?

Okay, so first I want to say thank you for allowing me to come up. I've enjoyed fellowshipping with your congregation and I especially enjoyed teaching with them last night.

Just a delightful group of people and I was so thankful for the opportunity. The question that you had about what is

Marxism is a very good question to ask, especially since you just described the conflicts that exist between social classes.

The haves, the have -nots, the able to the disabled, the different races and so forth. It all comes back to a conflict that is engendered by a desire for something.

It's called the dialectic of Marx or dialectical materialism.

And what dialectical materialism is is a philosophy that social progress occurs through conflict between social classes and that conflict is usually over material goods.

So the dialectic is the conflict, the material goods are the flashpoint of the conflict and the use of those material goods is what

Marxism is all about. The idea of Marxism is that there is a class that has access to those material goods and a class that does not and this has to be resolved through conflict and ultimately through revolution.

The way this manifested in Clark's philosophy of economics was that there was a capital class that owned the means of production and owned the capital of society and then there was the working class that did the labor.

In his terms it was the bourgeois and the proletarian. So the bourgeois had the capital and the proletarian did the work.

The way Marx described this conflict was what he called alienation.

He said that the workers have to compete with one another separately from one another in order to find work with the bourgeois and therefore they're alienated from one another and on top of that they end up producing products that end up getting sold to somebody else so they never get to know the person that buys them and the person that buys those products never gets to know the person that manufactured them.

And in fact in between those two entities is the capitalist who owns that means of production, pays the wages of labor and then takes the product of manufacture and then goes and sells it to someone else for a profit.

That alienation between the laborer and the product of his labor was something that Marx thought needed a solution.

He felt that it was unjust for the laborer to be alienated from not only from other workers but also from the product of his own labor.

And on top of that the capitalist who took the product of his labor and then sold it to the consumer took a profit in the exchange and in Karl Marx's mind that profit really belongs to the laborer and so the laborer is alienated from the profit that he's entitled to.

So Marx believed that because of the dialectical materialism as a philosophy that social progress is made through conflict the most obvious conflict that needed to occur was between the bourgeois and the proletarian and once that conflict was resolved it would be resolved into socialism as one step and then finally

Marxism, communism as its final step. That was the absolute ideal of what social progress should result in and social progress results in conflict between classes and the flashpoint of that conflict is material goods.

So the term that Marx assigned to the cause of that conflict was alienation and he believed that wage labor was the most profound expression of alienation and so wage labor needed to be eliminated.

The means of production in order to solve the problem of alienation the means of production needed to be publicly owned.

The wage labor needed to be eliminated. In fact, to solve the problem of alienation

Marx believed that the compensation of the individual should simply be the satisfaction that he knows the person that consumed his product and that he met the need of another person in society through the manufacture of his product and that person should find his satisfaction his reward, his wage in the knowledge that he had manufactured something for Karl.

So Karl gets to know the person that's consuming the goods that he manufactures and the person that consumes it also gets to know

Karl and they know each other in a truly human relationship that eliminates the capitalist as that middle step who is stealing the wages of the worker by taking profit in the exchange.

So the question that we should ask ourselves first of all is this biblical?

Wage labor is not prohibited in the scriptures in fact in many places in the scripture it is spoken of in favorable terms as if it is the norm.

Paul himself in 2 Thessalonians talked about how he converted his labor into wages so that he could procure bread to eat.

To Marx that was monumentally offensive that he should have to earn a wage in order to get food to eat.

He should get food to eat anyway and then just enjoy the satisfaction of having provided for someone else.

Marx believed that if people would simply implement this philosophy confiscate capital and the means of production from the bourgeois distribute it to the proletarian there would initially be a proletarian dictatorship but afterward there would be a utopia in which there was a surplus of all material goods there was no need for wage labor there was no need for private ownership of property and everything would be fantastic there would never ever be scarcity and there would never be oppression.

And that is an absolute fantasy when you look at what has happened whenever Marxism has been implemented.

So it's a fallacious system it's not based on the scripture but there's another question that I should ask is that do we really believe that our society is falling apart because I don't know who manufactured the pencil that I used at work today and is his world collapsing on him because he doesn't know what

I'm using that pencil for. And it's a ridiculous precept on which to build an economic theory this idea that I have bad feelings because I don't know who used the pencil that I manufactured and the person who's using that pencil doesn't know me and in the process there's this guy in between who took a profit in the exchange.

It's a ridiculous precept I don't lose sleep at night wondering who picked the orange that I ate for breakfast this morning.

And I don't think he's losing sleep at night not knowing who's going to eat that orange. And yet to Marx that was the central of his economic theory this principle of alienation.

And so he implemented something that would solve that or at least he thought it would solve it get rid of wage labor get rid of wage labor get rid of private property and suddenly there's a surplus of material goods and nobody has to feel bad anymore.

Right? Well the exact opposite is what happened. Under the

Marxist economic theory there is no incentive to produce because there are no extra rewards for adding efficiency to the manufacturing process or adding efficiency to the production to increase the production productivity of the soil or the productivity of the industry.

And in addition to that there's no disincentive to consumption. So people can eat as much as they want and use as much as they want because it's free costs them nothing.

Well what happens in a society when there's no incentive to productivity and there's no disincentive to consumption the result is scarcity because nobody wants to bring something to market because there's no extra rewards for bringing more of it to market and nobody wants to stop consuming too much because there's no penalty for overconsumption.

The result is absolute scarcity which is why famine is the natural result whenever Marxism is implemented.

And we've seen that in Venezuela we've seen that in Rhodesia when it became Zimbabwe where Marxism was implemented as the economic theory and the result is people die.

And the utopia that Marx promised never materializes. Every time it is tried it fails.

And yet there is within this current generation a call to go to Marxism, to socialism as our economic system.

And remember, socialism is simply the intermediate step that Karl Marx thought we needed to take to get from capitalism to communism.

So anytime there's somebody that's talking about we just need to implement socialism they're just doing what

Marx wanted. Marx wanted there to be conflict resulting in a new system which would be socialism which would still retain some of the conflict of the old system which would ultimately have to result in communism.

In fact, the Marxist approach to social progress is to foment that conflict and to put it in terms of the dialectic there is a thesis that exists and then there is a counterpoint, the antithesis to that.

The result is conflict and the resolution is achieved through synthesis. The new synthesis that results from the conflict of the thesis and the antithesis simply becomes the new starting point the new thesis for the dialectic.

And so now there is an antithesis to that thesis resulting in conflict and now synthesis which becomes the new thesis and in Marx's ideal that continuous chain of conflict thesis, antithesis, synthesis would result ultimately in the conversion from capitalism to socialism and finally to the economic ideal of communism.

So, in the end we can understand at least that Marx's objectives were to foment conflict and the way to foment conflict is by making material goods the flashpoint of the conflict and suddenly you've got a war between the haves and the have -nots between the classes and it's about material goods calling for revolution dictatorship of the proletariat and finally implementation of communism is the final solution and because the capitalist will not do this voluntarily of course his goods need to be seized from him by force.

So, you look at what happens with Marxism it's the elimination of private property the elimination of wage labor conflict over material goods.

But the scriptures militate against this strongly wage labor is perfectly fine and justified in the scriptures coveting your neighbor's goods is prohibited private property is a right that has to be respected and you look at what the scriptures say about private property and wage labor and covetousness and you realize that the scriptures actually prohibit

Marxism as an economic theory and therefore it prohibits the steps necessary to get to Marxism including socialism which is just that intermediate step that even

Marx advocated for he believed that in America we need to convert to socialism so that we can end up Marxist.

Now your second question about how is this being implemented in the church is how is this penetrating the church to become the economic ideal it's through the basically what

I call the baptism of Marxism and one of the chief proponents of that in today's church is

Tim Keller and Tim Keller has advanced the same theory the same

Marxist theory of thesis and tithesis joining them together for a new synthesis which is the ultimate solution and the illustration of that is really from his own words from his book

The Reason for God and he explains that he was raised as a

Methodist and a conservative Methodist denomination but when he went off to college he found the

Marxist dialectic in the new school, the Frankfurt School of Marxism and he thought to himself that the people from his upbringing who adhered to the

Christian faith were morally upright but they didn't have a great concern for the poor and then he met the

Marxists who were not morally upright and they were moral relativists but they had a great concern for the poor and so instead of simply rejecting

Marxism because it's prohibited in the scriptures and then instructing the Christians that they are to care for the poor because the scripture actually teaches us that we should instead he synthesized he did exactly what

Marx would have done he took the thesis which is his Christian upbringing the antithesis which was

Marxism and he synthesized in fact he states plainly in his book that he found a spiritual third way it's the synthesis it's the dialectic and Tim Keller is using it to bring

Marxism into the church when you look at his book Every Good Endeavor he states plainly in that book that alienation was first identified by Marx was first identified by Karl Marx as the cause of the unraveling of our society and wage labor is one of the things that's causing that alienation and so when

Tim Keller writes a book called Every Good Endeavor that is ostensibly the Christian work ethic expounded for the consumption of the church he says in that book well really the real problem is alienation and we have to solve a problem for alienation we have to solve the problem of alienation and Karl Marx identified it well what's interesting in the book is that as you walk through the book you realize he is starting with Marx's problem alienation and concludes with Marx's solution which ultimately is confiscation of goods through higher taxation elimination of wage labor elimination of the incentives to working harder and elimination of the penalties for not working harder or for making bad decisions and he actually ends up restating by the end of the book that if people will just adopt this new way of looking at it people won't be nearly as incentivized to work so hard and they won't be so disappointed at the result of I'm trying to think what he said there

Jeff, he said they won't be so disappointed at the at failures, that's what it was so by the end of the book he said basically if people will simply adopt this new way of looking at work they won't be nearly as tempted to overwork and nearly as disillusioned by failures well, what exactly does he mean by that?

and to understand what he means by that we have to go back to the foundation of his book and he says at the outset that he wants to answer the challenge that was issued to society by Robert Bella in his book from the 1970's

Habits of the Heart in which Robert Bella tried to deal with what is causing the unraveling of American society and Robert Bella felt like the unraveling of American society could be traced back to our expressive individualism all these people working separately for their own advancement or alienation as Marx would say it and so in Every Good Endeavor Tim Keller starts out with Bella's challenge

Bella's challenge was to change our work ethic and change our society by looking at work as a calling to meet the needs of society rather than a means to our own advancement through wage labor so go back to Robert Bella's book

Habits of the Heart and he actually takes that from Christopher Jenks' book

Inequality and in Inequality Christopher Jenks talks about the problem with unequal outcome in American society and there are some people that believe that the inequality in American society is because of inequality of education and ultimately

Christopher Jenks concludes that the real problem is not inequality of education but inequality of income and so both

Jenks and Bella advocate for government intervention to reduce the rewards of ambition, to reduce the penalties of failure and to equalize people's income in order to conquer this problem of expressive individualism or alienation and Tim Keller says at the outset of his book this is the challenge from Bella that we need to address as Christians to solve this problem of alienation that Karl Marx identified so Tim Keller continues through his book and so he calls on Reinhold Niebuhr and says well here's a guy who had a lot to say about this what did he have to say and then he calls on Dorothy Sayers and her writings on the work ethic and why work and creed and chaos, these are all essays in her book

Letters to a Diminished Church and she talks about wage labor and how it's been so ingrained in us as we work in order to get money so that we can get food to eat when instead we should be working just for the good of our fellow man and our reward is simply in the knowledge that we have provided for the needs of another man and all this is from Marx and if you continue through the book he finally concludes with Michael Schluter a

Christian economist who says that you know businesses shouldn't focus on profits they should rather be focusing on restoring truly human relationships to the manufacturing process and they should eliminate the pay differentials between the lowest paid person in a company and the highest paid person in a company in other words we should separate compensation from productivity and diminish the significance of wage labor and instead we should just focus on truly human relationships instead of profits which is just simply to recapitulate

Marx's economic theory and what you find throughout Tim Keller's books whether it's in Every Good Endeavor or it's in Prodigal God or The Reason for God or Generous Justice or Ministries of Mercy he continually is appealing to classical

Marxists and Neo -Marxists to develop an economic theory you go back to Every Good Endeavor and you've got

Robert Bella who's relying on Christopher Jencks they're both Marxists Dorothy Sayers Marxist Michael Schluter with his

Marxist economic theory Marx himself is quoted in Every Good Endeavor and you walk through this and you say well that's interesting he seems to rely on these

Marxists a lot. Reinhold Niebuhr another Marxist who believed that it was wrong for the

Ford Motor Company to be privately held it ought to be a public company who believed that private ownership of goods was the cause of all these crises in societies and need to be solved he believed that socialism must come to America and eventually the

American proletarian would rise up and cast off the bourgeois and then in Generous Justice Tim Keller defers to Vinoth Ramachandra who's a

Sri Lankan scholar who actually as it turns out is against the accumulation of capital which is what

Karl Marx was against and talked about how demeaning and dehumanizing it is to force people in different work sectors to compete with one another for business and that the gospel teaches us that the benefits of globalization need to be equitably distributed he defers to Gustavo Guterres the

Latin American theologian who speaks of God's preferential option for the poor but in the end he's really talking about the need to end private property seize the means of production and bring about communism by the intermediate step of socialism and when it turns out this scandalous justice that Vinoth Ramachandra talked about was really

God does speak about the need to care for the poor but also says the poor aren't allowed to steal from the rich yes

Gustavo Guterres points out the fact that God tells us we need to care for the widow but Naboth in his vineyard he owned the means of production, he was a land owner private property and God came to his defense when that property was confiscated through eminent domain.

God's preferential option isn't for the poor it's for righteousness and truth and justice which includes private property and not stealing private property from other people so when you look at Tim Keller's books and his continual narrative of we need to do this, we need to change our work ethic, we need to do this generous justice and the reason for God and ministries of mercy what you find is a consistent appeal to people who are either explicitly

Marxists or implicitly Marxists who are adopting that Marxist economic theory and in the end

Tim Keller recommends and I should say actually in the beginning it's from one of his earlier books, Ministries of Mercy he recommends two models of the ideal

Christian church and one is Allen Temple Baptist Church in California and one is East Brooklyn churches in New York and he says these are the

California model and the New York model of the ideal Christian church the full service church well it doesn't take very much research to find out what those two churches are all about Allen Temple Baptist Church preaches liberation theology and is inspired by the rules for radical by Saul Alinsky who actually taught about the revolution that needs to happen between the haves and the have nots to bring about communism and you go to East Brooklyn churches and you find out that they actually are founded based on the principles of Saul Alinsky and his rules for radicals and what we find is just actually the redistributive justice that you mentioned earlier about taking from the haves and giving to the have nots is social justice

East Brooklyn churches is involved in agitating with the local government to seize the property through condemnation by getting property condemned so they can get it and then sell it to people below market value to people that they think are the more appropriate owners of the property.

East Brooklyn churches is really about bringing about Marx's utopia by seizing private property and redistributing it.

The problem, the fundamental problem with what Tim Keller has done is instead of confronting

Marxism with the scripture and simply pointing out what's wrong with Marxism and rejecting it because Marxism is to be rejected and then addressing his observation that Christians aren't caring enough for the poor by simply going to the scriptures and saying we should be caring for the poor.

He did something that is really unthinkable and really unacceptable from a

Christian minister is he synthesized them he took them both together and said well there's a little bit of truth in both or a lot of truth in both so let's blend them together, let's baptize

Marxism and one of the things I said in the video last night is that when Jesus came to talk to us he said he only came to tell us what his father had told him to say he was only allowed to speak what his father had told him to say and he did not come and say my father had some truth but I also find the world has some truth and so I'm going to synthesize that message in order to formulate a gospel a gospel of redistribution of wealth he actually taught a gospel of the good news that he had come to pay for our sins and that we need to believe in that and by believing in that to become part of a heavenly kingdom the kingdom that God had set aside for his people and had come to establish not on earth but in heaven the kingdom

Jesus came to preach was a heavenly kingdom, the one that had been promised, the one that Daniel had foretold in the days of those kings, the

God of heaven would set up a kingdom that would never be taken away Karl Marx did not see the value of that kingdom and so he wanted a different kingdom that abolished religion, abolished family abolished private property abolished wage labor and that kingdom the kingdom of men ended up being very very bad news a hundred million people died in the last century because Marxism was taken seriously people are dying and starving in Venezuela because someone thought now we can get it right, we can do

Marxism right and Venezuela is going to be the socialist utopia that Marx promised that's what they thought about Zimbabwe too

Rhodesia and Zimbabwe Zimbabwe became a nation after Rhodesia was basically disbanded and they wanted to abolish the capitalist system and return the land to the people and guess what happened starvation and the same thing is happening in South Africa right now they're changing the constitution to make it lawful to seize private property without compensation and when you take away the private property of the land owners the people who actually know how to work the land and produce it and give it to people that don't know how to work the land and produce from it the result is going to be starvation that is the result, famine scarcity, starvation and misery and that's why

I refer to the religion of Marx because to adopt it you have to take by faith his promise of a utopia but it's bad news because it just results in misery of people on earth and that's why

I refer to it as the religion of Marx with a subtitle the bad news of the kingdom of men

I'll tell you this about the narrative the narrative of race in the culture it comes first of all from Darwinian evolutionary lies there is no such thing as race when we talk about it in terms of the

Mongloid and the Caucasian and the Negroid and the different forms of mankind as they arose from different ancestors, that is garbage and it's a lie based on Darwin's evolutionary theory the truth is there is no such thing as people of color and white people the color of a person's skin is determined by how much melanin is in the flesh it is not a binary white versus everything else people of color, that system is built on Darwinian evolution the truth is the amount of melanin in the skin is a spectrum and the differences in ethnicity and the cross -pollination if you will between ethnicities makes the whole concept of a binary between white and black or white and people of color a complete lie now this lie has infected the culture and it is destroying

America in a lot of ways through identity politics but it's also coming into the church

I'm a graduate of Dallas Seminary and I clicked on a Dallas Seminary chapel service just this week and I saw the title of it was

Woke Church this was the name of the sermon it was preached by Dr. Eric Mason who lives and ministers in the same city where I ministered from 2004 to 2016 inner city

Philadelphia and Dr. Mason pointed out that in the neighborhood in which he ministers most houses have 4 to 8 people living there with a household income of $15 ,000 to $25 ,000 there is a 90 % single parent ratio in these households according to Dr.

Mason and a 90 % abortion rate Dr. Mason then proposes 6 reasons for this being the case the first 3 presume the case that he's trying to make

I'll read them quickly number 1 white privilege he says that his church is very racially diversified however when the white people leave after Sunday morning they go back to the places in his own words whites go back to the atmosphere of their privileges his reason number 2 disenfranchisement of African Americans like the word marginalization this word itself assumes the case that is yet to be made people are not marginalized unless that is something that has happened to them which would have to be proved third capitalism capitalism has created a divide that the church should have been finding a way to remain connected

Timothy Kaufman will be with us to address that subject and then fourth he says that the city has cut the budget for schools and raised the budget for prisons fifth he proposes that African Americans have

PTSD from Jim Crow and finally he tells an emotional story in his emotional story one of the members of his congregation an 11 year old boy was given a gun by his mother and told that it was a play gun playing with this gun he shot his brother who then died out of this tragedy the police came and arrested this 11 year old and put him in with the general population and now because of that being put in with the general population the system has traumatized this boy and he sits in church after getting out rocking and crying a victim of the system these are the six proposed reasons for the problems in the city all of them do the same thing they assume victimization they put the person as a victim of society the structures whether it be prisons or schools or the assignment of an 11 year old to the general population but the bible has truthful answers to each of these questions they are not the emoting of SJ -ism they are number one

Proverbs 22 6 train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he shall not depart from it parenting the true victim and that 11 year old boy was a victim hear me of his own mother handing him a gun and what occurred because of that is the lack of obedience to the very principles of God's word.

Number two Ephesians 5 3 let there not be even a hint of sexual immorality the reason that there is a 90 % single parent rate in the city is because of the denial the abject rejection of God's standards of sexual ethics.

It is sexual immorality that accounts for that. The rejecting of God's word as revealed in scripture the abortion rate of 90 %

Leviticus 18 21 says we must not give any of your children to Moloch the burning of children to Moloch in the

Old Testament is paralleled in our day by the murdering of children in the womb.

The scripture speaks to this atrocity Romans 1 32 given approval to those who deny

God's word supporting and encouraging the social justice narrative which is fundamentally unjust and immoral and against the principles of God's word.

Exodus 20 verse 16 do not bear false testimony the lies of the social justice movement are what's keeping these narratives afloat and destroying lives the lives of children and 11 year old boys and finally number six the answer for the trouble of the inner city.

It's not victimology it's the gospel the gospel of Jesus Christ the person of Christ that he is the son of God the

Messiah God in flesh the work of Christ that he came and died on a rude wooden cross and paid the penalty of sin and rose triumphant from the grave satisfying the wrath of God against sin that all of this is according to the scripture that's the epistemology the basis the way of knowing the scripture according to the scriptures that's the gospel the forgiveness of sin which presupposes that I do not see myself as a victim but as a sinner who needs to be forgiven coming humbly to the

God who made me saying have mercy on me the sinner this is the disposition of the heart that brings healing the one who is humbling himself will be exalted by the gospel saved through Christ and finally repentance repentance repentance a change of mind a turning away from sin and a turning to Christ in faith that he alone can justify and save this is the hope for the city this is the truth that the city needs to hear so social justice broke the city woke broke the city but the answer is the gospel

I mentioned before while we were in the city we saw about a dozen apostates people who profess

Christ but every single one of them who have turned away in these last 10 years or so every single one of them that I know of turned away to social justice believing themselves a victim because of their sexual orientation or their race or their economic status or some other way of identifying as a victim but I just want to say this to those people because I know they'll watch this video turn back to Christ he will prove to be a perfect savior he forgives even apostasy if you repent turn back and believe the good news it was the wokeness of the social justice movement that broke the city but the hope is

Jesus Christ in him alone he is the same yesterday today and forever amen so a fundamental rejection of revelation turn with me if you will to the book of Judges chapter 16 verse 1 we've talked about how

Samson brazenly rejected the overt command of God not to eat anything unclean or to touch anything from a dead animal and he even gave that to someone else passing on his deceit to his parents so he had a problem disobeying revelation right well today we're going to see that one of the particular aspects of his rebellion against God's word and the revealed truth was in the area of sexuality

Samson this is in Judges chapter 16 verse 1 Samson went to Gaza and there he saw a prostitute and he went into her now this we would all recognize is sexual sin but by what standard by what standard can anyone say that the sexual choice that a man makes with a woman paying her money or not is sin well that would require the standard of God's word which we have notice what

Samson's standard was we actually saw it earlier when he married back in Judges chapter 14 verse 2 he came up and told his father and mother

I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah now get her for me as my wife first of all he's demanding get her for me is that a way to talk to your father no but in social justice there's equality parents and children there's not a hierarchy they must be made equal and here in that kind of thinking that rebellious rejection of authority in verse 3

Samson exposes his standard but his father and mother said to him is there not a woman among the daughters of your relatives or among all our people that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised

Philistines now recognize the Jewish people were not allowed to intermarry this is a theocracy this is not as we are in the

Gentile church this is Old Testament Israel and there's a law against intermarriage they're not to do this but what does

Samson say to his father verse 3 get her for me for she is right in my eyes she is right in my eyes she is the one that I want and this becomes the theme of the book of Judges if you'll flip all the way back to the very last verse in Judges you'll see you can just play it right there on your phone

Judges 21 verse 25 in those days there was no king in Israel everyone did what was right in his own eyes so here in is the issue with social justice a rejection of the authority of God's word in favor of what is right in my own eyes what

I feel what I think what I believe but by what standard is prostitution wrong by what standard is any manner of sexual sin wrong and there's little ears running out so I'll just pause for a moment what makes bestiality wrong what makes polygamy wrong what makes pedophilia wrong

God's word and the standard of righteousness that God created them male and female and set boundaries around sexuality so the consistency of saying that homosexual behavior is okay because it's right in our own eyes would necessarily allow someone who struggles in one of these different areas to also claim that what is right in their eyes is good for them unless you have an objective standard namely the word of God you have no access to truth there's no basis by what standard do we say what is right and wrong well this leads us to the main point tonight and what

I think is the most forceful point that we have as Christians to bring into the social justice debate and it is this idea that truth must come before justice truth before justice the problem with the social justice movement is it seeks justice before warring for truth it assumes the just nature of a cause and fights for it without taking the time or the effort to pursue truth in the first place we cannot have justice without truth every dictator that fought an unjust war assumed that what they were doing was truthful and right but they were deceived

Hitler was passionate about what he was pursuing and thought that he was on the side of justice but the problem was he was on the wrong side of truth so consider the social justice movement with regard to truth and justice we'll look at four quick examples and then move into the issue of sexuality the first that we'll mention is the idea of gender we all were watching last summer with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh an accusation was made by a woman that he had sexually assaulted her some 30 years before when a charge like that is made justice demands due process now due process is the

Proverbs 18 17 practice of seeking truth one man seems right until another comes and examines him

Proverbs 18 17 truth requires due process that you would listen to a charge and take it seriously but also listen to the evidence against that charge and examine that charge and listen to the rebuttal but before the truth war was ever fought social justice warriors were proclaiming what believe women believe women just on account of a charge being made that is the fundamental error of social justice pursuing justice before establishing what's true take it to the area of race

Michael Brown Ferguson it's been about five years now hasn't it when

Michael Brown was shot by a police officer Darren Wilson and somebody said his name was

Dorian Johnson that Michael Brown put his hands up and said don't shoot and he was gunned down mercilessly by a violent cop and much hatred against police officers was stirred up based on that but no time was allowed for truth to be established no due process and in time a grand jury had interviewed and listened to the evidence of all the witnesses that were there the ones who claimed anything similar to Dorian Johnson all recanted what they said well

I wasn't really there I didn't really see it eyewitness after eyewitness forensic evidence established that the whole entire idea of hands up don't shoot was a lie built by one man named

Dorian Johnson Darren Johnson was exonerated but he was still harmed by what happened social justice was claiming to be pursuing justice but was truly the enemy of truth and therefore the enemy of real justice a man's life was destroyed and sadly

Michael Brown's life was lost as well and we of course lament that but the issue of truth and justice is what's in the fore let me give you two more quick ones economics the plight of people in the city and the poverty that exists is it a result of systemic oppression redlining and all different kinds of practices of the past or are there other reasons a question like that before justice could be pursued in economic areas would have to involve a truth war evidence examined

Thomas Soul wrote a book called Discrimination and Disparities where he did the research but it's unfortunate that those on the left in the social justice crowd refused to interact with the actual truth the statistical research provided by Thomas Soul they don't want a truth war they want a justice war assuming a cause and then fighting for it fourth and then we'll move on to sexuality there's the issue of nationality the building of a wall on the southern border one of the representatives in the

US not the senate I think she's a congresswoman said that concentration camps had been built and people are being forced to drink from toilets but when actual video evidence went into film the toilet did not even have sitting water there was a flowing water source above it and the charge itself was a lie many people believe the charge but until a person exercises

Proverbs 18 17 or James where it says be slow to speak quick to listen it could have been true but due process would have required the investigation of the evidence not believing and pursuing justice without a truth war and that brings us to the issue of sexuality the issue of sexuality is one of the biggest in our culture today and I want to say before we

I read you a quote this issue is a gospel issue it is a gospel issue if the

Bible can't tell Samson that his prostitution was wrong objectively speaking then

Samson would have no way of repenting and turning to the Savior had he been in the New Testament follow me if the

Bible cannot establish categories of morality of what's right and what's wrong a person is no longer able to repent and turn to Christ for the forgiveness of that sin when you read the list of the fruit of the flesh in Galatians chapter 5 verses 19 to 21 the first three refer to sexual sins and there's another reference in that list as well and the conclusion of that matter is that those who practice these things will not inherit the kingdom of God sexual sin is damnable as is all forms of sin but if we have a gospel there has to be a substitution for sin and unless the

Bible is able to define what sin is a person cannot repent of the sin that so easily entangles many people do what's right in their own eyes but if the

Bible is not allowed to speak to what is right in God's eyes people remain under His condemnation so it's not loving to avoid the truth war it's not loving to pursue justice on behalf of the

LGBTQ community however many letters whatever they are at the moment it's not just and it's not loving because unless we address this question of truth we're holding people captive in their sin

I'm going to refer to you a video that I'd like you to watch if you have time this week if not just mark it it is a debate a truth war that finally took place between a

Christian who believes the Bible and someone who claims to believe the Bible but has rejected the biblical sexual ethic write down Graham Codrington that's

G -R -A -M Codrington C -O -D -R -I -N -T -O -N versus James White just put

YouTube put those names in and it'll be the first thing that comes up they debate for a couple hours what is the truth and the interesting thing is all through the process one of the two people presented biblical positive evidence for what marriage is the design of God the plan of God and the negative evidence outlawing certain behaviors the other emoted

Graham Codrington emoted throughout the discussion and finally in the last three minutes he decided to make a positive case because he himself said well let me then put a positive case to you he said we don't want people who want to spend their lives together to do it in a half -hearted way notice the word want we want to bring them before God and say this needs to be a covenant that is witnessed by heaven and then he said let me then put a positive case to you in doing this

I'm doing this because God demands justice in the thinking of Graham Codrington justice is his cause but we've yet to establish the truthfulness of his cause he goes on to say 150 years ago he demanded justice for slaves and there were

Christians who had to stand up and mainly fight against their Christian brothers and sisters this is our issue and we must do it because God loves gay people

God created gay people and it is not good for anyone to be alone so Codrington has argued but he's argued for nothing but justice he's made an equivocation between what happened with slavery and what is happening in today's cultural battles but never gone to the

Bible or any objective source of evidence to establish by what standard he claims he's fighting for justice so let's spend about 5 minutes reviewing what scripture says to this subject and I want to give you what

I think are the most important arguments by the way argument is not a bad word debate is not a bad word it means that we're pursuing truth we want truth before we can pursue justice number one you'll hear the argument that Jesus never spoke against homosexuality answer that argument this way it cuts both ways

Jesus never directly spoke for homosexuals and their right to marry and against their oppression he did speak against oppression didn't he recall this

Jesus is the Son of God omnipotent omniscient he knows all things surely he would know that standing in his midst were many people who either struggle with homosexual behavior or are actively involved in it and yet he never spoke a word to liberate them from the oppressive heteronormative community in which they live so that argument cuts in both directions but more strongly in favor if we're going to make an argument from silence more strongly in favor that he did not approve of homosexual behavior otherwise why did he leave him hanging when he had the chance knowing the struggle knowing the debate that would be going on today he never recorded one word in the

Bible in support of homosexual behavior but that's an argument from silence and that's as far as that can go we have contrary to the other side of this truth war we have positive biblical evidence so go first of all to Matthew chapter 19 a question was raised about divorce and in the context of divorce not being able to divorce for any and every reason there were two schools of Jewish rabbinical thought the

Shammai and the Halal theories some would be more conservative and some more liberal and allowing divorce or not allowing divorce but in Matthew chapter 19

Jesus strongly affirms God's creative order and what marriage is by positive definition so what does he say let's just begin in verse 3

Matthew 19 verse 3 and Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause he answered have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh so they are no longer two but one flesh what therefore

God has joined together let not man separate so the positive teaching of Jesus is to affirm the

Genesis creative order of male and female complementarity that in the male and female union there is a oneness a unity that happens that cannot be in a homosexual relationship this is the design that God has given us and Jesus reaffirms this also in Matthew 5 17 he says of the law do not think even one jot or tittle the smallest stroke of the law will be abolished until its purpose is fulfilled so he goes on to explain that the law of God is still in effect in the moral ethical realm teaching us what's right and what's wrong it gives us a moral compass now there's no longer animal sacrifice because Jesus has become the final sacrifice there are other changes and things that happen through the blood of Christ but the morality of the law is something that Jesus himself affirms and then we go to the

New Testament teaching directly on the subject Romans chapter 1 would be the third place to go Romans chapter 1

I remember when I was in college I went to a professor that was teaching heresy and had denied all of the other fundamentals of the faith as well and so I went and I said well what do you do with Romans 1 because he had just taught contrary to the scripture at this point and he said you know when

I come to that passage I just read it against the grain but we don't have the option if we're students of the scripture to read against the grain of God's word otherwise we become the teacher over the scripture rather than the scripture being the teacher of us we have to read with the grain the way

Paul wrote it inspired by the Holy Spirit let's look now at verse 21 in Romans chapter 1 it says for although they knew

God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened claiming to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal

God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things therefore

God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever now

I started early here just to set the context that what is taking place is an exchange an exchange of the glory of God for man made idols what's right in the eyes of a man an exchange of glory there's been a suppression of truth verse 18 suppressing what

God has clearly revealed and so there's a giving over to suppress the truth and to the very things that God has disapproved of verse 24 another giving over here therefore

God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever amen for this reason

God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature you see the argument here is a fundamental disorder contrary to the male female dynamic that God created there is now an exchange of that for something that is fundamentally disordered there's not a context here of of mere temple prostitution or a relationship that involves an older man with a younger boy or any of the arguments that people who want to accept the text but deny the meaning of it there's no such argument here the context is an exchange of the natural order that God has created for idolatry and what does it go on to say and the men likewise gave up what natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error so the bible clearly speaks to the issue but we're going to end with one last verse because the bible's teaching about homosexuality is not different from other areas of sin in the sense that God has a gospel that speaks to our sin including to homosexual sin or all forms of sexual immorality a great verse to go to is first Corinthians chapter 6 verse 11 and this is the hope of the gospel this little phrase and such were some of you and such were some of you the context in verse 9 includes homosexuality that there were in the

Corinthian church people who were homosexual practicing homosexuals nor men who practice homosexuality nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God but this hopeful gospel verse the good news that we have to offer to all the world and such were some of you but but you were washed the blood of Jesus is powerful enough to cleanse from all sin you were washed they're told you were sanctified you can be set apart from the works of the flesh sanctified made holy from those things this is good news you were justified declared righteous how in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God so in closing the

Bible is not vague in this area it's not a debatable subject as in well there's some truth on this side and some truth on the other the truth is the

Bible speaks directly from cover to cover with one consistent message God's creative order the positive reason for marriage is the complementarity of man and woman companionship procreation it's his design it's a good design it's his plan there are direct unequivocal prohibitions against homosexual behavior can't be argued from scripture in the case of a truth war the

Bible is clear but the gospel offers hope to those who are willing to repent and believe the good news this is good news that we have to offer we don't need to be ashamed of it and those who are ashamed of the gospel

Romans 16 no longer have good news to offer a sinful world the

Bible defines sin but the Bible offers a savior a washing in his blood a sanctification in his name justification by faith in the one and only son of God so this is our gospel we must not compromise to a culture that's turning in the direction of feelings proclaiming it a justice movement when in fact it's a rejection of God's truth thank you for praying turn with me if you will to judges chapter 14 verse 14 judges 14 verse 14 and Samson said to them out of the eater something to eat out of the strong came something sweet this is a famous riddle of Samson's and if you notice the rest of the verse all of the friends all of the

Philistines who had been hanging out with Samson failed to answer the riddle they couldn't get it but if you'll read on in verse 15 on the fourth day they said to Samson's wife entice your husband to tell us what the riddle is lest we burn you and your father's house with fire have you invited us here to impoverish us and Samson's wife wept over him and said you only hate me you do not love me you put a riddle to my people and you have not told me what it is and he said to her behold

I have not told my father nor my mother shall I tell you she wept before him the seven days that their feast lasted and on the seventh day he told her because she pressed him hard then she told the riddle to her people if anybody doubts that there are differences between men and women all you have to do is go to the book of judges and read about Samson clearly there was something different about the woman and the men right she was able to get some information out of him that they were not able to because of gender differences so Samson was a judge of Israel and by judge when we hear that judge we kind of think of a black robe sitting up on a high seat and making decisions for the people and that certainly did have that was part of the model of what a judge could be in Israel but a better word to understand the full scope of what the judge did was deliver

Israel when Israel fell into sin and then captivity from some oppressing people a deliverer was sent from God to bring freedom and Samson is a picture of a deliverer so he is a judge someone that God raises up turn with me if you will to chapter 13 verse 25 notice that even though Samson has many flaws that we're looking at in the course of this study

God is still using him in a powerful way it says in verse 25 the spirit of the

Lord began to stir him and then if you'll flip to the very last verse of the

Samson story in chapter 16 verse 31 you notice that when he is buried he's buried in the same place where the spirit of the

Lord began to stir him and the author of this book is making a point by that that God had used

Samson as a judge in Israel he had used him for this purpose it says they buried him between Zorah and Eshtial in the tomb of Manoah his father so Samson was a judge used of God and there was something particularly masculine about Samson's role to grab a jawbone of a donkey and destroy

Philistines was a particularly masculine role to pick up the gate the iron gate and carry it a far distance and then to overcome the enemy time and again this was a particularly masculine role but you say wait a minute wasn't there a female judge in Israel and her name was

Deborah there was but if we had time to spend in Judges 4 and I'll give you an encouragement to go home and read that passage and look at it the author of Judges makes the point that it was the lack of masculinity of a male leader named

Barak which caused God to use Deborah for the judging of Israel and it's even said that because you have failed to step up and lead essentially

I will use a woman to conquer the enemy and so not only

Deborah as the judge but then when the king is fleeing from the people of Israel God uses a woman

Jael to crush the head of the king so therefore we say wait a minute the author there is making a point the masculine role that God had for the deliverer for the judge was something that was being abdicated by the men of Israel and therefore

God raised up a woman into that role as another form of judgment on Israel and isn't that consistent with the teaching of scripture?

How many female kings did Israel have? Exactly zero.

How many of the twelve apostles that Jesus hand selected were females?

Zero. How many of the first seven deacons chosen to be deacons in the church were female?

Zero. Now there is an outright prohibition in 1st

Timothy chapter 2 verses 11 to 15 of women serving as elders in the church.

That is a role within the church that God has designated as a masculine role and what

I am doing here this evening in pointing these things out is cussing in our culture.

There is hardly anything I could have said today that would rile feathers more than what

I just said if posted on the internet for others to see. Oh wait, that's what we're going to do. And that's okay because we're not here to please the culture.

We're here to tell the truth and the truth comes from scripture. So we're going to talk in a minute a bit more about this idea of gender and the role differences that God has made.

The definition of masculinity. I'll begin with that now. It comes from the council of biblical manhood and womanhood which is deriving from biblical principle a definition which distills kind of the difference between masculinity and femininity.

So just real quick just take down these definitions and you can look them up later. But here's a definition for masculinity.

At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect women in ways appropriate to man's differing relationships.

Conversely, at the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman's differing relationships.

These definitions of masculinity and femininity are contra to the social justice movement.

You say, okay, we're studying social justice. What exactly is that again? What is social justice?

It is the flattening out of differences between people in order to have sameness.

And if we talk about the area of gender, we recognize as Christians that men and women are equal before God.

There's not a hierarchy with God, but God has made men and women, each of us, men and women in His own image and therefore equal before Him.

And yet equality does not mean sameness. Social justice flattens out distinctions between people.

In the name of equality, in the name of equity, in order to achieve equality kind of as a goal in and of itself, all disparities are to be eliminated.

However, some differences are God -ordained, such as gender. So, this was assumed for many years.

In the days of Samson and then all through the Old Testament and in the New Testament, it was assumed that there were differences between the genders.

And these are God -ordained good differences. God made them male and female. What changed?

Well, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the rise of social justice in our culture. It parallels the fall of biblical

Christianity. A falling away from biblical Christianity. The rise of social justice can be traced to its original father,

Karl Marx. Karl Marx, in the Industrial Revolution, postulated that the differences that he was seeing in the capitalistic society in this

Industrial Revolution, the differences were being caused by oppression. One group was holding the other group down, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

And those differences required revolution. So Father Marx proposed a revolution that would overthrow the social structures that are fundamentally oppressing the poor.

This teaching gained esteem, gained currency, until in the 1840s, the mother of social justice was born.

And I will say that that was actually Luigi Taparelli speaking for the

Roman Catholic Church. As a Roman Catholic Jesuit, the Jesuits were formed as a reactionary movement against the reformers in the

Counter -Reformation. Luigi Taparelli, a Jesuit, coined the term social justice and began to populate the idea, making it popular among the people.

By the year 1931, social justice, the elimination of disparities, had become official

Catholic social teaching. And that teaching spread into the more

Roman Catholic areas of the world, especially Latin America. This is where you'll find Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru, picking up on social justice teaching and founding the

Liberation Theology Movement. The idea of Liberation Theology was not the old rugged cross that we've been singing about, but the idea of overthrowing fundamentally oppressive societal structures.

Jesus the Revolutionary. And there were other teachers in America and in Europe that were teaching this social gospel,

Rauschenbuschism, if you will, the teacher Rauschenbusch. These teachers began to populate social, to make popular,

I should say, not populate, popularize, social justice teaching until it began to carry the day in the academy.

Now, this form of teaching could not have survived a truth war.

The fundamental incoherence of the social justice movement would not have survived a truth war.

But concurrent to the rise of these Roman Catholic teachings was the rise of postmodern philosophy.

So, Jacques Derrida and other postmodern philosophers began to postulate that there is no such thing as absolute truth.

All truth is relative and subjective to the person. Coming from different standpoints, each person arrives at their own truth.

And therefore, the fundamental teachings of social justice fit with that philosophy.

The experience, the standpoint of a woman, has to be different from that of a man, and so the truth of a woman is different from the truth of a man.

Similarly, with race, or nationality, or economic position in a culture, each person arrives at their own truth based on where they stand.

And so social justice has carried the day. I would argue that social justice has become the majority religion in America.

How is that the case? Well, amongst Roman Catholics, there is a conservative wing that rejects much of social justice teaching, but the majority of Roman Catholicism is accepting of the church's social teaching.

In fact, the Pope himself is a social justice warrior. If you look at the mainline denominations in the

Protestant churches in America, virtually everyone have taken the bait of social justice hook, line, and sinker.

And it has become the new religious teaching of the mainline Protestant churches.

And there are exceptions. Not all who remain in those denominations hold to the teachings that are taking over from the academy.

But then, if you look at the Democratic National Committee platform, you will find that the religion of social justice is underlying virtually every position that they stand for.

It is a religious teaching and taken all together, it has become the majority position in American culture.

It is also fundamentally immoral. It is not built on biblical categories of morality, but is actually a throwing away of biblical categories, most obviously in the area of sexuality.

The Bible clearly defines the parameters of sexual relations, and yet the social justice movement takes an opposite point of view to what the scripture teaches.

And in all areas of social justice teaching there is a fundamental rebellion against the revelation of God, just like we saw with Samson rejecting the revelation of God with his

Nazarite vow in the eating of the honey from the carcass.

Social justice has thrown out the revelation of God for a privatized truth that comes from the heart and the emotions of individuals.

So that's where we are. I would like to take now just a few minutes to do a case study of social justice as it relates to this area of gender.

Because not only is social justice immoral, and I'm calling it the immoral majority, not only is it immoral, it's destructive, it's deadly, it's vile, it's harmful, and it's straight out evil.

Apply this in the area of gender. First a more innocuous example and then we'll take it to the next level.

There is a movement afoot that all athletes should be paid the same.

And we'll look at this quote from a female basketball player named

Sue Bird, who happens to be the girlfriend of Megan Rapinoe, who was the soccer star who did so great in the

World Cup. Well, Sue Bird, playing on a WNBA team, she wrote an article and in it she talks about her girlfriend,

Megan Rapinoe, and says that Rapinoe put American soccer, women's sports, equal pay, gay pride, and true love on her back and all at once scoring two majestic goals to lead

Team USA to a thrilling victory over France. Well, we enjoyed that, didn't we?

Did you guys see that when that happened? It was great. We enjoyed the soccer game. But now Sue Bird goes on to explain that she had long wanted to write about the equal pay debate or wanted to write a lot, prepared a lot, but decided just to say this.

I was planning on making some points and going in, but then I thought about it some more and to tell you the truth,

I'm kind of done with that. If you're not on the right side of this fight and advocating fiercely for equal pay, whether it's in soccer or basketball or in any other industry and across every intersectional boundary there's that word for intersectionality, then

I just straight up feel bad for you because you're sad and wrong and going down.

I feel that in my bones increasingly over these last several months having seen my colleagues in the

W show we mean business on a new CBA. That's collective bargaining agreement.

Sue Bird goes on to talk a little more trash and then basically sums it all up with two words saying pay us.

The argument for equal pay is that the athletes in the W, which is the

WNBA, should be paid the same as the NBA. Should women in the

WNBA be paid the same as the men who play in the

NBA? Well, we'll get into the economics of that question in a couple weeks.

We have a special guest coming to help us with these economic questions. His name is

Timothy Kaufman, wrote an article for the Trinity Foundation. He'll be here in two weeks. But I don't want to talk about the economics of the question.

I want to talk about the gender differences of the question. Are male athletics and female athletics fundamentally the same?

Are men and women athletically the same? The head of the

NBA, David Stern, in 2009, said that he fully expects to see women playing in the

NBA within a decade. Mind you, he said that in 2009, and this is 2019.

It didn't happen. And here's the point. As it stands right now, women are welcome to play in the

NBA. In the NFL as well, this league spokesman

Greg Aiello said this, the NFL has no male only rule. All human beings are eligible.

As long as they are three years out of high school and have a usable football skill set. Here is the truth that Sue Bird would need to hear.

The difference between male and female is God -ordained and real. The fact that there are no women playing in Major League Baseball or in the

NFL trying to block Fletcher Cox from rushing against the quarterback

Carson Wentz. The fact that there are no women playing in the NBA is not discriminatory.

It's not bad. It is a God -made difference between men and women.

It's not a bad thing. If women wanted to play in the NBA, they would be welcome to do it.

The difference is that there are no women in the world capable of playing in the NBA. Is that a misogynistic thing to say?

No. That is the truth of the matter. All women are welcome to play in the

NBA. The equal pay debate. There is a W in front of the

NBA for a reason. Because the Women's National Basketball Association is not the

NBA. There is a difference in the level of play. And what should determine the pay of an athlete in the

NBA or NFL or any league is the desire and the marketability of the game.

And the economic question should be market -driven based on what people want to watch. To demand by collective bargaining agreements, that's okay.

But the lawsuit that's now slapped on the U .S. team from the women's soccer team is a fundamental rejection of the

God -ordained difference between men and women. We look at this example and make the point, and it sounds like that's misogynistic.

But I want you to understand something. A little disagreement like this, as innocuous and fun as the conversation can be, is opening the door to something deeper.

Because by the very same logic, the erasing of gender differences between men and women, babies are murdered in the name of social justice.

Because God has ordained that women can become pregnant and men cannot become pregnant.

This is a good and God -ordained difference. But it affects a lot of things about careers and sports and all aspects of life.

And by rejecting this God - ordained difference of the ability to become pregnant, a movement is afoot in our culture, which says that if a woman feels that her career would be hindered or she's not ready based on her situation in life, she is free and autonomous to kill the life that's growing inside of her.

And men, based on standpoint epistemology, because men cannot be pregnant and because she has a private truth that comes from within her, men like me should have nothing to say about it.

That is inherent to social justice. That those who are in power or in a position of oppressing, which is assumed in the social justice construct, those who are in a position of power cannot speak to an issue.

As this argument is made that men need to be quiet, shutting up half of the population of this country over this question, and shutting up all the fathers of these children, who should also have an equal say, babies are suffering under the banner of social justice.

This, brothers and sisters, is an atrocity, and it's no laughing matter. Our culture has bought into the lie of social justice, and it is an immoral travesty resulting in the murder of 60 million human beings since Roe versus Wade.

Roe versus Wade was an unjust decision, and it makes a difference in the society.

It's a societal structure because it's now the law of the land. And so in a broad sense, social justice means bringing justice to society.

Without the cultural Marxism that has come to define the term, just as a term in and of itself, we should be pursuing justice across the spectrum of society, but there is one glaring injustice in our country to which no other injustice comes close, and that is the atrocity of baby murder.

Innocents who are made in the image of God, in the name of social justice, being put to death for no reason.

And so we, brothers and sisters, need to stand stronger for the truth. And though you'll be shouted down, half of you, for being men, and the rest of you, with equal passion, treated as a betrayer of your own gender, stand for the right to life.

Be willing to stand for the truth. Because the truth doesn't care about your gender, does it?

Any more than it cares about feelings. Truth is something objective, and it's defined by God who reveals what that truth is.

We have that truth in the scripture, Psalm 139, that God forms a life inside the womb of a mother.

So we need to stand for justice. Amen. Alright, turn with me to Judges chapter 16, verse 23 and following.

This is the exciting conclusion of sweet social justice tonight. Judges 16, 23 to 31.

Now the lords of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to dig in their

God and to rejoice. And they said, Our God has given Samson our enemy into our hand.

And when the people saw him, they praised their God, for they said, Our God has given our enemy into our hand, the ravager of our country, who has killed many of us.

And when their hearts were merry, they said, Call Samson, that he may entertain us. So they called

Samson out of the prison and he entertained them. They made him stand between the pillars and you know the rest of the story.

Calling upon his God, he puts his hands on the pillars, leaning against them. The power of God returns to him and he's able to push the pillars down.

Three thousand people gathered on the roofs looking in, not to mention the thousands of people in this auditorium were crushed by the falling building and Samson had revenge on his enemies.

The last verse says, Then his brothers and all his family came down and took him and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtael in the tomb of Manoah his father.

Right where this all began, he had judged Israel for twenty years.

Now, Samson was in a war, a physical war. Philistines versus Israelites.

The Israelites were the children of God, the Philistines were the enemies of God. Psalm 119 verse 121 says,

I have done what is just and right. Do not leave me to my oppressors. In the story, the

Philistines are oppressing the Israelites and yet, the narrative of the Philistines is that they are the ones being oppressed.

The same is true for the church in our day. We are not in a physical war. This is not a physical battle against Philistines.

We are in a truth war, an ideological war. There are philosophies of man that are opposing the word of God.

The truth, the justice of God's word is under attack and yet, the very people attacking that are claiming to be victims of Christianity and the

Bible, turning the truth upside down. Isaiah 520 talks about calling good evil and evil good, exchanging bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

So when we say sweet social justice, we are talking about a deceptive sweetness, a lie that masquerades as truth.

And what is the nature of that lie? Well, it is the assumption of being a victim across any area of difference.

The idea of Marxism where there are economic differences between the rich and the poor and those differences are caused by oppression.

It's assumed that the bourgeoisie are oppressing the proletariat, or is it the other way around?

I think that's the right direction. Well, that difference, economic difference, is now being pushed on all areas of difference in culture, whether it be race or sexuality or gender or nationality.

Any area of difference between people is exploited by social justice warriors in the attempt to feign victimization.

So this is the nature of the truth war. Now, if the war was only us versus them, the good guys versus the bad guys, we would band together like the

Israelites and there is no way on earth that the enemy can overcome he who is in the church.

Greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world. Ideologically, we have the sword of the spirit.

We have the truth of God's word. We have the spirit of the living God living inside of us. So there's no match.

We would stand, but here is the deceptiveness of social justice.

It doesn't remain outside of the doors and fight from there. It has an insidious way of creeping into the church.

Notice, Samson's greatest enemy in Judges 13 -16 is not the

Philistines, but Samson's own sin nature. His own capitulating to the lies of the enemy.

His own Philistine ideology. He was attracted to Philistine women and led astray by those very women that he allowed himself to get too close to.

It wasn't that the Philistines overpowered him. It's that there was too much of Philistine in his heart.

He allowed it in and the church has done the same thing. We must be careful with allowing teaching into the church which is not from this word, but from the surrounding philosophy.

Man's word mixed with God's word. Our friend Timothy Kaufman mentioned that rat poison is 98 % food and 2 % poison.

It's that mixture of poison in food that tastes right and is right.

The mixture of the poison within that that makes it so dangerous. That's where the danger lies.

Let's take a couple examples. Economics. We notice that Tim Keller has brought some economic teachings and Timothy Kaufman proves that in a subsequent video series that we can post.

The religion of Marx. LGBTQ agenda.

We talked about a debate that happened between Graham Codrington and James White. Codrington arguing from the scriptures, attempting to claim that the scriptures allow for LGBTQ activities.

Adam Hamilton is a pastor of a church of 22 ,000 members and ostensibly evangelical, but he says this, the question we're left with is those six or seven verses in the

Bible that say something about some form of same gender something and we can't even be sure on some of those.

Are those passages more like the things we all agree are timeless or are they more like the passages we just have said we no longer apply to us today?

What's Hamilton doing here? He's claiming that the Bible lacks clarity.

This is an attack on the perspicuity, the clarity of scripture, the ability of God not only to speak but to speak clearly and to say the things he wants to say.

He claims that there's only six or seven verses. Well, there are six or seven verses that directly address homosexuality and in no uncertain terms condemn homosexuality as sinful behavior, but there's also the positive case that we talked about from the book of Matthew chapter 19, the definition of marriage itself as between a man and a woman affirmed by Jesus and Jesus silent to the issue of homosexuality means he affirms everything that the law already established to be the case.

So, next. Race. The issue of race. Eric Mason in the church, ostensibly an evangelical speaking at the

MLK 50 event hosted by Together for the Gospel. He said that white churches need to stop hiring token black people because the only reason those black people would be available is if they were too low quality for the black churches to hire them.

Furthermore, those who accept these positions are essentially Uncle Toms. Do you see the racial lens in which he's seeing people?

Categorizing them by a Darwinian picture of race, not by the biblical picture that we are all one race in Adam.

He's seeing people by the color of their skin. He even goes on to say in Darwinian terms, you have a person that's black on the outside, but angloid on the inside.

And when Paul Tripp, who attends Mason's church, says that for all these years, he now confesses that his gospel of justification by faith has been a truncated gospel.

He needs now to herald this message of social justice, racial justice.

He's capitulating again and bringing social justice ideology into the church. When Beth Moore says, shh, don't tell that I'll be preaching to a church on a

Sunday morning, she acts as if only fundamentalists would oppose such a thing.

And ostensibly, she is complementarian. She is evangelical. And yet the clear teaching, 1

Timothy chapter 2, that women are not to teach or exercise authority over men, is being denied by her very actions.

Do you see the subtlety of social justice? It's not just out there. It comes into churches.

And so, in closing, our job as Christians is to stand for truth in the truth war.

We need to fight for the truth. If we surrender truth in our churches, we have no sword left with which to fight in the culture wars.

But this isn't just about culture war. There are issues in our culture, and human flourishing is affected by the truth stands that we make in the culture.

Little babies made in the image of God will be killed or not killed based on how we stand for truth in the culture.

Little boys who are feeling some gender confusion, who would, by liberal liars, mutilate their bodies to change the gender that God has given them, they hang in the balance for how willing we are to stand up to the lies that they're being told.

So it is a culture war in that sense, but more than a culture war, this is a war for the gospel.

This is a truth war for the very gospel that we preach. Because social justice is infiltrating churches and redefining the gospel in terms of a revolution, a societal change to make things more just and right for all people.

And that redefinition of the gospel is the most dangerous thing we face. If we allow the gospel to be emptied of its core component, which is substitutionary atonement, that Jesus died for our sins,

His shed blood to pay the penalty that we deserve. If we allow social justice warriors to empty the gospel of the meat of the gospel, we have no gospel left.

That's what's at stake in this war. Brothers and sisters, we are the ones in minority.

Christians are in minority here in America. Now there's many who still claim to be Christians, but they don't hold fast to the

Word. We who hold to the truth of the Scripture as God has spoken, we are in minority, and we need to be willing to stand and fight in the truth war.

It's politically incorrect to do so, but Christ went outside the camp and suffered there.