Have You Not Read S3:E25 - Interview with John Michener (Part 4)

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Durham,.

John Mishner, Chris Giesler,.

And today we decided to start off talk about the eclipse that just happened yesterday. How did we, what did we see?

How did we feel about it?

Chris, you wanna start us off?

Yeah, it was pretty neat. It was, so we went down to southeastern Oklahoma to see the totality, and we didn't think it was gonna happen. I mean, we knew it was gonna happen. We didn't think we were gonna see it because the clouds rolled in about nine o 'clock in the morning, and they were there most of the morning.

And then just about the time we get to about maybe 15%, the clouds start rolling away. And so we were able to look through the glasses. At some points, the clouds were thick enough, you could just look up to the clouds and just see the eclipse without the glasses.

But then I was surprised at the difference between just the regular eclipse and the total eclipse. I was expecting it to be, okay, here's an orange ring around the moon. It was completely different. It was amazing.

And then the drop in the temperature, the drop in the light, even like the change from a small bead. So even if you didn't have like a crescent part of the sun showing, just a little bead was enough that you had to put the glasses on.

And I just thought that that was amazing that the sun, the rays from the sun are that strong that you still have to put glasses on when a small part of it is showing. And then just all this stuff surrounding it, I could see two of the planets.

I looked for the comet, but I couldn't see the comet. And then even like the temperature change was weird. It wasn't like a weather temperature change. It was like, oh, something's blocking the sun. Like if you're at a fire pit and someone's standing in front of you, like you can tell the fire's there.

There's like an ambient heat, but there's something in the way. It was a weird kind of shift.

How'd your kids react to it?

They were in awe. They were just, they're awesome. Sam, he didn't know what was going on, but he kept trying to look at the sun. I was like, stop it. I was like, okay, everyone else is looking, but you don't need to.

But they were just like, this was amazing. Some of the other people there were, you know, tearing up. And then you had different eschatological views. So people started talking about rapture and horsemen and different things.

So that led to good discussions. One of the funny things was we were on land and we were at a lake, but we were inside the park. And so there weren't a whole lot of people there, but there was like a whole crowd of cars parked across from the lake.

And as soon as it was total eclipse, they all just lost it. They all just started screaming and hollering and going crazy. And you could hear it from across the lake.

They were probably my cousins.

We're not taking your clothes off.

We were down there, but like a Pine Creek area.

Okay, yeah.

It was down that direction.

It could have been my relatives.

John, what about you?

Oh, it was the same.

We went out of the way to drive down to Texas. We've got some family and land down there where we could not be near all the crazies. We passed, you know, packed out parking lots, $20 for parking, blah, blah, blah.

We heard stadiums were full down there, but we were out in the country. We were 40 miles from nowhere and it was great.

It was peaceful.

But like you, when we got up in the morning, we went, oh man, it's 100 clouds. We're about an hour away from the eclipse. One of my good friends had also gone down to a, he was like 200 miles away, but also in Texas.

And he texted me, no, he called me. He was like, dude, this is so disappointing. I said, well, we're under 100 clouds. So he answered like a good Yorkshireman. Oh yeah, well, we're under 110 clouds over here.

So if y 'all don't know about the Yorkshireman, look up Monty Python's Flying Circus, the Yorkshireman,.

And that's what we're talking about.

But yeah, and then the same experience, we're under that same weather pattern. And you couldn't tell it was starting. And then just as the moon takes a bite out of the sun, the clouds start to break up and then it just opened up.

And for that four minutes of totality, it was in a perfect hole in the clouds for the entire time. And you were talking about how intense the power of the sun is. And I was trying to think of all these different metaphors to help people understand.

And I'm like, well, it's like 0 .001 of the sun is not hidden and you still can't look at it. But how do you wrap your head around that? And then I thought, okay, well, what about one of these great big 60-inch high def televisions?

We all understand like megapixels. Imagine only one megapixel works. The rest of them are dark. But that one megapixel is so bright, you can't look at it. And that's what it was like. And then all of a sudden, when that last megapixel gets covered, it's like, somebody turned out the lights.

The lights went out. I mean, 15 minutes before, the crickets started going. And then the roosters started crowing because we were out in the country. So we had dogs barking, roosters crowing, and crickets going off 15 minutes before totality.

And then it was like someone just reached over and either slammed the door shut or turn off the light. And there's Venus and there's Jupiter. And it's like, we can't hardly see each other. It was just wild.

Michael?

Yeah, we went down to Ada, where relatives there spent the night and then went on down towards Hugo, Oklahoma. Didn't make it all the way there, but there's a T-junction between Antlers and Hugo. And there was a little parking area.

So we just pulled off right there, had a perfect spot and had a picnic and just kind of waited. And we did have some cloud cover, but it was intermittent. And so every once in a while it would like pop up and everybody put the glasses on real quick and look at it.

And then they would cover over again. But because there was a thin layer of clouds, a lot of the times you could just look with your own eyes and just look at it. And you didn't have to put the glasses on.

And when it finally went full eclipse, everything went silent and it was like cool. And crickets started up and everyone there was like, wow, this is really neat. And what was interesting to me is that, of course, you get to see the corona.

You get to see all the edge of the sun, the beads and the flares coming off of the sun, but it's not the sun. You know, it's just the interior glory. It's the stuff just near the sun that you can't see when the sun is in its full strength.

Only when you eclipse the full glory of the sun do you see the brightness of what is connected to the sun. And I was thinking that that's the way it works in the scriptures. It's only if you eclipse the full glory of Christ that you get all wrapped up and excited about Israel or all wrapped up and excited about this other little doctrine over here or maybe speculation about comets and eclipses and speculation about end times or

There's rumors of wars, earthquakes.

Trumpets.

Trumpets.

But you only see that and get ramped up about it if the full glory is eclipsed by something else. That's what was going through my mind when I was

Well, and the sun calls himself the reflection of the Father. And so to use that metaphor and apply it that way, if God is too amazing for us to look at directly, we've got the sun, that light that shines.

Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, Jesus saying he's the light of the world and coming into the world, he enlightens every man. He's like, he is our light. He is our light. To have him eclipsed, the beads and the solar flares and everything, if that was all the light we had, what a dark world we'd be in.

But to have the true full glory of the sun, what a blessing that is. And those were the thoughts that were going through my head as we were hanging out.

You know, there was another cool thing that happened. We were sitting around having, you know, sausage and coffee that morning, kind of getting excited about it and bummed about the clouds and everything.

In the background, we had one of the major networks on, but it was muted. I don't know if it was NBC, CBS, ABC, but it was one of them. You know, they always have a morning show. So the morning show was all about the eclipse and we're just minding our own business.

And I just happened to turn my head and there's Dr. Hugh Ross, the Christian astronomer. He's the head of Reasons to Believe. I went, quick, turn it on, turn it on. He's on national TV. And so here we got to have a Christian apologist on national TV saying that this points to, I mean, what does the word cosmos mean anyway, but design and order.

And he's talking about the divine order of the universe, that we can even see this and that we live here at a time and a place when it's perfectly lined up, only it should increase our faith in the divine order of the cosmos.

I was like, go Hugh, that was great.

All in all, it was a stellar experience.

Nah.

Well, I did not experience the same totality as you guys did. I was kind of at the edge of 90 eclipse up in Stillwater, Oklahoma. And I was, believe it or not, for the first 15, actually probably 30 minutes before that, I was spending my time locked in Boone Picken Stadium.

I was up there slinging, dipping dots into freezers and I was trying to get done so I could get out there and FaceTime my wife and watch my kids enjoy it. And then I get back to the gate so I can get the dots into the freezer and the gate's locked behind me.

So I had to call my connection and get the gate code.

And I got

You're literally a cowboy captive.

Oh yeah, yeah, I was, I was.

And I was thinking about yelling boomer sooner at that one end of the field, but I decided not to. Yeah, I don't have enough pride in it anymore to really care, but I just went and put the dots away and got back with like five minutes to spare, I think.

Called my wife and got to watch the boys, watch it on FaceTime. And of course, when dad gets on the phone, they're not worried about anything else but how they look on the FaceTime screen and dad looking at them and watching them.

What, there's a hole in the sky, but how do I look on Facebook?

But that kind of gave me some thoughts about how all these things happen and who are we supposed to be looking to? And my sons naturally know that their orientation to me matters very much. And how much more does our orientation in our eyes need to be set on our heavenly father in those situations?

And I kind of compared how they were acting as my children to the other children I saw walking around campus. Some of them did not even care that there was an eclipse happening. They were just getting from one place to the next.

Some of them were punting a football around, throwing a Frisbee. There were a few that would look up and watch the glorious event that was happening above them. But we should all be considering the father in those situations in the light that he has brought to us so graciously.

That was my experience in 90 eclipse. And it was rather a fun one being trapped in Boone Pickens Stadium at the time.

Do you know what one of the top spikes on Google searches today was?

What?

Why do my eyes hurt? That's one of the people who were Googling. Why do my eyes hurt.

I was thinking that eye doctors

Because they thought the clouds were good enough.

I think that eye doctors and the chiropractors are going to be like making the real money after all this, because everyone's like cricking their neck, looking up.

You're not saying this is a conspiracy, are you? Did the eye doctors put this thing in the sky.

To boost their industry?

Not at all.

They're just taking advantage of opportunity,.

Unlike government, which creates the opportunity to take advantage of.

So you're telling me it was a Death Star that was coming across and blocked the sun and not the moon, right?

Right.

The directed energy lasers that we've all been told about.

That'll come back later in the episode, I'm sure.

Speaking of the news.

Well, we can move to the news that came out of Arizona and Florida. And John, I bet you are probably best placed and probably the most well read on the situations that are happening on the ground there right now.

Well, funny you should say that, because I got a lot of phone calls today and I was sitting out in the car here 30 minutes ago.

And one of my friends go,.

Did you see what they're doing in Arizona and Florida? I was like, well, actually, I haven't read the measure specifically. So I don't actually know what they're voting on, but I know it's abortion related and it's a bad idea.

I said, you know, it's a bad idea. And he goes, well, that's what I got. I was about on page 40 of your book and I'm seeing that, yeah, that's a bad idea. So he had connected the dots from what I had written in overcoming the dark side of the pro-life movement.

So the idea that we would send a question to the vote of the people on whether or not something should be permissible when it's a matter of absolute right and wrong is ridiculous. That's just like, let's just grab a mob of angry people that wanna commit murder and say, now, wait a minute, before you lynch this guy, let's take a quick vote.

Well, they're all gonna vote, let's lynch them, they're a mob. Well, everybody in our culture of death right now, I say everybody, I think the vast majority of people want abortion to be available at some level, right?

So you put that to a vote of the people,.

They're gonna go, yeah.

Even if they're personally against it, they're gonna be thinking about all the sob stories that have been programmed into our psyche through propaganda for the last 40 or 50 years. And they're gonna go, okay, well, I guess I got to, that's the compassionate thing to do.

There's always exceptions, so I'll vote yes for the exceptions. But the idea that we would put it to a vote of the people is just ridiculous. I think I've got a write-up on about it here in my book. If not, maybe it's a newsletter I wrote recently, but can you imagine the deep South putting it up to a vote of Louisiana plantation owners, whether or not we're gonna have slavery?

How are they gonna vote? Why are we doing that? Those are magistrates who don't understand their job. Their job is to uphold God's law and protect people's lives and property, but they think their job is to do the will of the people, which is whenever the people want, the one that give other people what they want, but that's not what's good for them and that's not what's right.

So they don't actually wanna do the hard work of doing what's right, so they cop out and they say, well, let's just send it to vote of the people and then they don't have to do their job. But here in Oklahoma, we actually have a measure pending in the legislature that would put it on the ballot similarly.

So that's one of those things we gotta watch out for. I think it was Bullard and David Bullard from South Central Oklahoma is trying to put that on the ballot.

As a state question?

As a state question. To put in the constitution whether or not abortion is gonna be permissible. So that's a terrible, terrible idea.

Right, because it's already illegal.

Yeah, well, it's already against God's law and it's already against the constitution. And any normal reading of the homicide statute would say, well, abortion applies here as well. So it's only when you get down into all the little pro-life compromise statutes that you find permission to legally murder a child by abortion.

Right, I mean, they have to put in specific exceptions to say, no, no, no, abortion isn't to be treated as a homicide.

Right.

The fact that they have to put those in.

Shows where it belongs. Yes, exactly. By common sense.

You know. Exactly. It would be like if we had a culture where it was just, you know, a whole lot of people thought it was just fine and permissible for mothers to go steal from their children anytime they wanted to without, you know, just take whatever they wanted whenever they felt like it.

So they had all the laws about theft and larceny and embezzlement and all that. But there was always an exception there that mothers could go take from their kids whatever they wanted to without prosecution.

Yeah.

It's, you know, so it's obviously not something that should be put to the people on a measure.

Well, and so of course there's been, I was sort of scanning channels today, all the AM stations and the talk shows. And the language is the same everywhere. When you listen to the national talking heads, they act as if there's this red state, blue state divide.

And oh, well, you know, there's these states over here where abortion is completely illegal now. No. No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Abortion is legal in every state in the union. It's only a question of slight difference of how, when, where, and why. But you can do an abortion in any state, certainly in the first trimester, which is 90 of all abortions anyway.

Yeah. And we don't have red state, blue states. We have city controlled states and we have county controlled states. It's not red and blue. It's city versus county everywhere.

Do we want to talk a unit party ever? Or is that just me? That's probably just me.

I just see every choice pretty much on a ballot and between the major political parties as it's a hidden false dichotomy. You've got two gates and you can enter either gate, but on the backside, it's the same coliseum.

Right. Exactly.

It's kind of like those recycling memes. It's like recycling memes. You have three little holes to put your stuff in.

And they all go to the landfill.

Same gas, same bin.

Which by the way, is the truth in Oklahoma City. They're not recycling your glass. It's going in the landfill. It just makes you feel better. It's like wearing a ribbon. See, I care more than you. I'm wearing a ribbon.

Which I mean, we could say they're outliers. Some of the ones that have actually put forward abolitionist bills, but they're few and far between.

Right.

And they're having to go against the leadership of their own party.

Right.

And that may be where some of the opposition is most fierce for them, especially.

Let's backtrack to some really big news a while back when Roe v. Wade got overturned and said this never should have happened. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. When that happened, I would say there was a whole lot of folks that I know you talked about in our last episode.

Just average believer who is like, yeah, I'm pro-life. And what they mean by that is like, we don't think abortion should ever happen.

Okay.

And they know that they're against abortion. They know that it's wrong. They're not probably credibly informed about all the nuances that are going on. But when they hear that Roe v. Wade got overturned, they sense this is a major victory, especially with all the screaming heads on the news media.

They know something good has happened. And they're rejoicing. And then word comes in from many hardworking, sincere brothers in Christ, abolitionists, saying this was an awful thing that happened. This was a failure.

This was bad. This is not what we wanted. And I felt deflated personally, right? I understood that their argument, that Roe v. Wade being overturned, it was overturned on improper reasoning, right? They overturned it because this should be something that should be controlled by the states and decided by the states.

The federal should never have had this jurisdiction. And what the abolitionists were saying is like, unless it was overturned with an affirmation of full personhood for the unborn child, then this is still unjust.

So I understood what they were saying, but it sure felt deflating to hear all these people that I've gone to Abolition Day with, I've listened to, we've supported, and we've tried. All I heard was, on this day that I told my children, years before, you're gonna see this happen.

We're gonna pray for this, we're gonna pray, we're gonna see victories on the field. It won't always be defeats. And to me, it looked like a victory. I'm not saying that it wasn't without its problems.

I'm not saying that it was, but there was something there that could have been rejoiced in. And I'm thinking, boy, you had an opportunity here for some momentum, for some like, hey, this was good, but here's what we need to do next.

Yeah, look at the momentum we've got. This wasn't a perfect win here, but look at what's happened so far. We can do more. We can make progress with this.

Well, I think part of what you're leading up to here is a question of whether we are individually optimists or pessimists, right?

I'm thinking more of like, when I go to abolitionist rallies, when I listen to podcasts and so on and so forth, in general, what I hear is discouragement. Like, for instance, and I understand the motivational thing, and there is a need to be serious and somber, and this is not a wonderful thing that's happening, and we need to call it what it is, it's evil.

And I understand what the point was to say, babies are still murdered here. That was an important message to say, because people thought, oh, there's no more abortion in Oklahoma. Well, that's not the case.

As you've well pointed out, it's still happening chemically everywhere. But in general, it was like, hey, here's another year of failure. We're still not there. And so when I'm interested in hearing, and what I think would be a benefit to the whole abolitionist movement is what are the successes?

What are the success stories? Where are we making gains? What are some things that we can say that says, yes, indeed, there are some things that are happening that are good?

Well, I think we need to set up the conversation by helping everyone see that there's a big picture and there's details. There's the forest and there's the trees. And when you talk about the big picture, you're talking about times and epics and eras and giant shifts in culture and political movements and things like that.

And so as you began to introduce this question of what's the positive and what's the good, and you're talking about here was this huge thing that happened, and it was the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The dragon was slain.

The Hydra was killed. Its head was cut off. But whoops, we come along and say, no, there's 50 new heads. We actually have a really bad problem still going on here. So I think it's important to step back and look at the big picture of where we are in time and space and realize that there's these huge swings in history and cycles that repeat.

You know, we just had the eclipse. Oh my gosh, is it the end of the world? What does it signal? I'm pretty sure we've had eclipses before and we'll have them again. And it could signal the end of something dramatic.

It could be the fall of Oklahoma, the fall of the United States, the fall of Ukraine, the fall of whatever, Italy going up in smoke today in the news or whatever. Sure, there's that sign, but we also know that there's no end to the seasons.

There's a time for everything and there's planting and harvesting and the world keeps turning and everything keeps going and these things come around again and again. You mentioned the eschatological questions that come up as we start talking about the end of the world.

There's so many different ideas about what the end of the world looks like. Is it the end of an age, the end of a country, the end of the cosmos and universe? What is it actually the end of that we're talking about in scripture?

And you know, one thing I think we can safely say when we look at the book of Revelation is whether it applied to a time in the past or a time near to us or still in the future, I think you can safely say that there's a pattern in Revelation and that there is a great judgment coming upon us all at some point in the future and there will be another one, another one until the cosmos is gone back to elements.

There, I have lost myself in the big picture.

Let me get back in the weeds for you.

What I was gonna do is mention on the overturning of Roe, it's easy to immediately sometimes look at how well the evil one and the power players of our day can snatch the narrative and they define the terms and they immediately march forward with their agenda and it's like, crud, we thought we had something here, now look how they're leveraging this down our throat for more death and destruction.

But I think I like to look at each event and analyze it for its own merits on the details and everything. When I look at the overturn of Roe, I think, gosh, that is something to celebrate. That was an awful, wicked beast.

It was overturned. That is good and while it's easy to say some of the argument in Dobbs is rotten, but they did have a good argument that criminal law is actually the correct legal purview of the states.

Hello, we have our own borders, we have our own police, we have our own capital, we have our own chief executive, we have our own judicial system, we have our own jails. We never needed Washington, D .C. to tell us what was murder, rape, theft, homicide, first degree, second degree, third degree.

All of that has always been the proper jurisdiction.

Of the states.

So I celebrate and applaud the absolute right logic that this is a criminal matter for the states to decide. Now, of course, where they fell short was not recognizing equal protection of the law for every human being.

And so now you have a nice, red, conservative, Bible-believing state like Oklahoma comes along and says, okay, abortion's bad in our state, okay, but no woman can ever be prosecuted for killing her own child.

So that's the bad part.

But you have, so you see how, though, it has shifted the conversation. Post Roe, now the conversation's about whether or not the woman should be punished. Prior to that was whether or not a state could defy the Supreme Court.

Right, now that's been set aside.

Now that's been set aside, and so now we're moving closer into the target.

That's right.

And to me, that's a great success.

I think so, too.

We're gonna set this aside, and then now we're having discussions wherein people are like, can a woman be guilty of something?

Right, because we were talking geopolitics, and we were talking about these huge collectives of power of government and pro-life lobbyists, and is Washington, D .C., and is the court, and is the president, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, all of a sudden, we're talking about sin.

Yes, yeah.

And that's a huge opportunity for us as Christians to be interjecting the gospel in all of these conversations. And also, we no longer need to be distracted by what's happening in Washington, D .C., and the presidential election, and what's happening down in Florida and Georgia.

Every state has trash in its own backyard that needs to get cleaned up.

Amen, amen.

And now, we in this room can work on our state, and we'll send this podcast to the next state where people like us can hear it and get fired up to clean up the trash in their state.

Yes.

And that's how we go about it. But if you're asking first, what are the success stories? If you're a glass-half-full kind of guy, like I think all of us are in here, we can say, look, Dobbs did give us a great opportunity to focus on our own backyard, to talk about sin, and to drill down into the heart of the issue, and allow us, free us up, to talk to politicians who are actually way more accountable to us, who will actually listen to us, because they're local, and only a few thousand people elected them instead of millions.

So I think all of that is hugely positive, just on the political aspect of it. But for those who struggle, I think for those who struggle to see the positive, well, just forget about geopolitics and the big picture and all that, and let me just remind you that nothing has changed for you.

You as an individual believer still have a personal responsibility to hold back those being led to the slaughter. You still have a personal responsibility to speak up to those in authority, and that's something you can do knowing that that message is going to have some sort of impact today or in eternity.

And I really want to direct you to chapter 18 of my book, Overcoming the Dark Side of the Pro-Life Movement, because at the end of the book, that's the final chapter, the question is, what can you do?

And I've broken down about 14 or 15 different things you can do times two, so more than 30 things that you can personally do on the political side and on the personal evangelistic side that you can be doing to get involved.

And it's there that you're going to have the kind of success stories that motivate you, that warm your heart, that give you the reason to keep going. As I reflect back on all the years we spent here going down to the gates of death, to our local abortion altar of child sacrifice, you know, we would see hundreds and hundreds of people go in to murder their children.

How many of those moms or dads or grandparents or pimps or boyfriends or whatever would actually come over and talk to us? I don't know the percentage, but we're talking like one out of 100. But you get one come over and change their mind, and then you see their baby born.

That is success. That's the one lost sheep that the Lord goes after. Yeah, 99 died. So are you gonna throw up your hands and cry and wail for the 99 and then walk away and give up in disgust? Or are you gonna keep coming back to save the one?

And if you'll focus on the one and know that the Lord does that too, then that's the kind of thing that feels very good about ministry, very good about work. And so I can encourage you in that. Get the book, read some of the stories that I've been a part of, and just know that that's times 10 ,000 because there's believers in every state doing the kinds of things we talk about in this book, whether it's politically or personally, whether it's going to the gates of death and trying to actually stop a baby that's gonna be murdered that day, or going down to your local street fair or university campus and striking up conversations with students.

These are where you're planting seeds. And just remember that that parable of scattering seed, most of the seed goes on the hard path and the rocks and the bad soil and all of that. But there is still a harvest, whether you see it or not.

It's totally worth your time, your energy, and your effort to go out and have these conversations.

So you mentioned the numbers one out of a hundred. I played a little bit of baseball in my time, and that's a lower average than even some of the worst hitters that I've ever come across. How much does faith and patience factor into you going out to the abortion mill every day and knowing that that's gonna probably be your percentages when you show up?