Idols of the Hills: Unmasking the Deceptions in Today’s Church

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We're here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the

Christian life. Today, we're going to talk about, well, we're going to probably talk about a lot of things.

But if you guys remember when I had Pastor Jeff on, he was the

EFC pastor who, well, yeah, they tried kicking him out and taking his church and it didn't work out so well because he stood firm on the truth.

And through him, I got to meet Pastor Phil. And Pastor Phil is one of the speakers at the recent conference that I told you guys about there in New Jersey, where we formed the

Truth Fellowship. If you remember back when Pastor Jeff was on, we talked about it being the

Truth Council, but we decided on the name Truth Fellowship. And so I met

Pastor Phil through some Zoom meetings that we're having. He kind of organizes those and leads those. And then we got to meet in person and figured some of his story would be really good for those of you in this audience.

And he will probably, I'm sure, talk about a book he's got called The Idols on the

Hills. You can get that, I believe, on Amazon. And so we'll find out if there's a better place to get that, but we'll talk about that as well.

So Pastor Phil, welcome. Let folks know a little bit about you, where you pastor, where you're an elder now.

And then if you could, in part of your background, talk about how you got to know

Pastor Jeff and some of your, let's see, how can we word this?

You're waking up to the wokeness, I guess would be the best way to explain it. Right.

Well, hey, it's such a privilege to be on your show, Andrew. And hello to all of your listeners. A little bit about me.

Let's see if I can give you the Reader's Digest summary. Again, I was a pastor for a long time.

I've done things like pastoring, church planning, a little different than most people. I got out of seminary.

Originally, I was majoring in music and drama. So I had this leaning, these dreams of dancing around Broadway by now.

But the Lord got ahold of me. There's a few people out there who have just taken my roles. I mean, it should have been me on that movie or whatever.

So anyway, I felt this call to the ministry in college, went to seminary and was trained in a place called

Biblical Seminary, which is reformed pre -mill. And that was part of a group. The man who led that,

Andrew McRae, was one of the people who was a very elderly man at that point. But he had been around during the great fundamentalist liberal splits of the 1920s.

And so people who were trained by people like him watched the church because there's no such thing as a perfect church, maybe no such thing as an eternal church outside of what

Jesus Christ has created. But even Peter and Paul never created an eternal church that lasted forever.

And so we're always on the watch for things that go wrong. And so coming to the modern age,

I found this group, the Evangelical Free Church, that I liked very much. I began to work with them back in the early 90s.

After working with smaller denominations and independent churches and groups like that, I did church planting for them.

So I've worked in positions such as pastor, church planter. I've been worship leader at some free churches, occasionally pulled off to other churches to maybe help them with the singles ministry or create an outreach or something like that back in my singles days.

And more recently, how I got connected with this whole group of people was that every church is under attack, always has been.

But the kinds of attacks that occur today are what I call the seven -headed hydra hiding behind a

Gordian's knot. In other words, you know the story of the seven -headed hydra that, you know, the hero goes and tries to kill you, you lop off a head and the other six are sniping at you and the head grows back.

And so you have to hit it in the heart if you want to kill it. Well, what if a seven -headed hydra found a Gordian's knot and put that right in front of its heart?

So you're standing there trying to untie the knot. And that's what ministry feels like nowadays.

I mean, there was a time generations ago when your job was to know your denomination, know the

Bible. And maybe that meant if you're in the 1700s, why you're a Baptist and the other guy's a

Presbyterian. Then before you notice why you're a Methodist and why the other guy's a Presbyterian or a Baptist and why you are or are not a

Catholic. Okay. And then all of a sudden, we started seeing things like evolution pop up. We started seeing the attacks that that brought on the scripture.

And then in the 20s to do a really whirlwind pile of history, you had the great liberal conservative splits, you know, and then all of a sudden you're fighting things like communism.

And where did that come from? And the people who trained me were very anti -communist, whereas today that's something that maybe that has gotten lost in understanding why that was a real problem in history.

Attacks like psychology. Things like, you know, I'm from the camp that would say that as scientists, psychologists have come up with some useful things.

But tragically, it's been buried in the worldview that supports most of modern psychology, starting with Freud.

Freud viewed people as simply a kind of machine and that you could tinker with them and you could fix them.

But especially if you didn't use God, God just created guilt as far as, you know,

Sigmund Freud was concerned. So now pastors have to be watching for that. And then you had all these things coming up.

And then all of a sudden in the 90s, we're being told the world is going to melt. So we better dump everything.

The world's melting. And at first, I mean, I'm somebody that, you know, one time I was a youth pastor and I was driving along with some kids and one kid was eating a

Snickers bar. Then he rolls down the window, throws the candy bar wrapper out the window. Well, I stopped the car.

I said I backed up. I said, you pick that up. I really made quite an impression on him and the other people in the car.

So I'm a I'm a fan of saying that we are keepers and managers of our world. But on the other hand, a problem comes along that I would summarize as what

I call the Judas principle, because if you've read the story of Judas, when the woman comes along with the alabaster vial,

Judas says that money could have been given to the poor. And we're told in John that, no, he didn't care about the poor.

He just cared about being a thief who wanted the money for himself. And so he weaponized virtue.

He came along and said, OK, this is really about charity and you all want to be charitable.

So trust me with the money. And that really wasn't the case at all. And I saw that beginning to happen all over.

I began to see that, you know, people that were saying the planet was melting were in line to make a whole lot of money from windmills and solar cells.

So now there's big green as much as there's big oil. And then another big problem came with racial reconciliation.

I mean, I grew up in a very, very liberal world where I had black friends and Jewish friends and Catholic friends, every kind of friend under under the sun.

All we cared about was, do you want to go somewhere in life? And the people who wanted to go somewhere were studying and singing in the choir and whatever.

And the kids that didn't want to were joining gangs. And this was equal opportunity. White kids joined the white gangs and black kids joined the black gangs and so on and so forth.

So I did a little bit of work with racial reconciliation in the 80s with the Billy Graham Association.

And that was a wonderful experience. And that's the whole story. But then fast forward a few years.

One of the things I've done on the side in order to support things like church planning and doing idealistic things like working with poor people and whatever was to learn how to work with computers and actually picked up a nice piece of paper along the way that enabled me to both do computers and teach on the college level.

So I all of a sudden one minute I'm an actor and a singer and a worship leader. The next minute

I'm a pastor and I'm preaching. And the next minute I'm playing with computers and getting a paycheck doing it, which was wonderful.

So anyway, here we are. I'm teaching at a community college in Newark, New Jersey, and I decided to help out the

InterVarsity organization. And of course, their big mecca is Urbana. So 2015,

I finally, after years of hearing about Urbana, went to Urbana and I heard they're going to start off with racial reconciliation.

So I thought, hey, that's great. I'm into racial reconciliation. They're into racial reconciliation. They gave the first full two nights the

Black Lives Matter. OK, now I'm sitting there wondering the nice way to say it is what's wrong with this picture?

OK. And do these people and I'm thinking, well, maybe I'm, you know, listening to too many conservative news podcasts or something.

So I went to the Black Lives Matter website. And sure enough, just as Vody Balkan reported more accurately in his book.

Yeah, they're a group of trained communists whose goal is to destroy the nuclear family. And so here is a good example of a hijack of something that's otherwise good.

I think it's virtuous to want to live in a world like Revelation 7, where all the people and all the nations and all the languages come together to worship

God. But how do you get there? And the problem is the BLM people, the CRT people would hijack that for their own purposes.

Throw in a few shysters and charlatans along while you were simply proffing from it and you have a big problem.

So you can understand why when we started seeing these kind of things pop up in the evangelical free church, as well as other places like the

Southern Baptists and the PCA and the OPC, that I'd be very, very concerned. And that's how I ran that.

Jeff wrote his book. I read it. I thought it was a good book. It was centered on the way this was affecting the free church.

But ever since then, we've been friends. And so that's something that has that because I'm trained by people who said you need to be watching for the attacks on the church, you need to be watching for that.

Maybe I'm a little quicker to say, hey, there's one, there's one, as opposed to many organizations.

And I'd say this is a challenge for the free church are good people, intelligent people. But the tendency is to get along.

The tendency is to be nice. The tendency is to say, well, you know, here's a speaker. So let's be a big tent, let everybody in.

But maybe not to be as skeptical as we should be and look at the sources and the motivations.

So let's say in terms of the wokeism, I'd say that that's one of the big problems as a little side issue.

Some years ago, I saw some of these things happening and I decided to write a book which became

The Idols on the Hills. And that came from my influence. Francis Schaeffer, who wrote a book called

How Should We Then Live? And the idea of having a Christian worldview. Now, Francis Schaeffer's assumption, he felt this obligation to work within academic thought of the day.

So he started developing this idea of a secular humanism and battling that.

I decided in my book to go a little bit deeper. I was working with people who were concerned about really the biblical theme of idolatry and what that does to people, because I was watching, oh, things like people who were

Christians who would vote for political candidates who supported abortion or who supported gay marriage.

And I found myself saying, well, what is this? What's going on here? And I began to realize that really much of what the

Bible talks about in terms of ancient idolatry was very much alive today. It had just changed form.

And so my whole book is similar to Francis Schaeffer's book, How Should We Then Live?, in that it tries to create a

Christian worldview, but based on idolatry, going all the way back to the beginning, looking at the roots of idolatry and then seeing how that has connected with the modern age.

How does it affect modern psychology? How does it affect science? How does it affect, you know, theology?

Why is liberalism in the church? And where did liberal theology come from? And all these other things, the environment and what have you.

And so the idea of the book is to create something that starts people at the beginning, all the way back to the garden, works through the ideas of meeting

God and understanding the incredible gifts that he gives to us, and then talking about why people fall away, why they follow the idols, whether physical statues.

And you still see that all over the world, or why they follow these more changed idols like greed, materialism.

And there's, I give some of the names like the God of the better life. There's one I call the God of smarts.

Okay. And we can talk about any of those that if they're causing you to be interested. And so that brings us to the current day into our discussion of why

I'm hawking my book and trying to suggest that people should have it on their bookshelf. Yeah.

Well, you and I have much in common. You and I, we talked when we met in person. I went to seminary not far from you, where you went to seminary, but we are both trained to look for the dangers, right?

You from seminary, me from the Jewish background, trained to, we were trained in Hebrew school to see the signs of what led to the

Holocaust, because the belief was there'd always be another one. And if you could identify the signs, maybe you could stop it, maybe you could avoid it, but to recognize the signs.

And I've been saying for over two decades now, the signs are there, but it's not Judaism, it is

Christianity that will be under attack. And people thought I was nuts when I said that 10 years ago.

No one's thinking I'm nuts anymore. I mean, ever since 2020, everyone realizes, yeah, okay, it's really clear.

If you doubt that, let's see, we had the government coming in, shutting down churches, and now everyone's up in arms because the government's trying to enforce law by removing people who break our laws, just, okay.

So, and you know, it's interesting, you mentioned the Black Lives Matter, and you probably don't know this, but I did on my other podcast,

Apologetics Live, we dealt with the issues of Black Lives Matter. We did a couple of episodes, and there's one where I went through all of their points that they had, was their goals, and you know, some of which we mentioned.

Now, they don't mention, they didn't mention specifically, we're trained Marxists, but we had that audio that they had, and so they've said that.

But we went through all the points, and we pointed out that their goal was to destroy the nuclear family, and it was interesting because we got a takedown order for that, because somehow that was, we weren't portraying them fairly, and that next week, after we declined the takedown, it was removed from their website.

Wow. So we, of course, went back on and pointed out, oh, it's gone. We didn't mention that there was a takedown order, because we didn't know legally what kind of trouble we could get in, especially in, you know, the 2020 -2021 timeframe, and so we kept that just private.

But yeah, so I'm not saying they took it down because of us, but I know there were many others that were also pointing that out, and so we were probably a small fish, but enough people were pointing it out that enough people were aware of it.

And there's a lot of people that aren't. I mean, they are, it's like, no, they're for Black Lives. No, they're not for Black Lives, unless it's the

Black Lives of the Three Founders, because they've made millions off of it. But it's something that you end up seeing.

They were, I mean, they are Marxists. That's who they are. That's why

I talk about, like, the hijacking element that we all have to watch for, that we're weaponizing virtue so that we can hijack all causes.

And Black Lives Matter is, as I want to say, a wonderful example. Let's call it a very pertinent example of that happening.

Yeah, and look, COVID made it abundantly aware to many people.

Many people woke up to the wokeness. We've said this both on this program and Apologetics Live.

For folks who are regular listeners, you know this, but Striving Fraternity was ahead of the game on this.

We have been speaking against social justice and its ilk for decades.

When the Southern Baptists came out with their MLK50 conference, and that's when a lot of people went, whoa, what's going on here within the

Southern Baptist Convention? And they started to realize the Southern Baptist Convention is teaching racism, and it just didn't sit well with folks, and they realized this isn't sounding right, there's a problem here.

But not everyone could put their finger on it. They just couldn't quite tell what it was that was wrong.

And we have been talking about it for a while here. In fact, many may remember way back then, before COVID, if you can remember back before that, right?

I was one of the guys who wrote a letter, there were 75 of us that signed a letter to John MacArthur asking for him to put his weight behind a statement we wanted to write on social justice in the gospel.

John MacArthur agreed to put his weight behind it, and what ended up being the decision was that 19 folks would get together and draft the initial statement.

Obviously, if you get 75 people in a room trying to draft a statement, that's not so easy. But they did, the letter was then, it was drafted, it was sent to the rest of us.

There are specific things that I wanted changed, and they were changed. So, I do know that it wasn't something like, oh, well, it was just these 19 and that was it.

No, there were some, it went back to us, the feedback was given, we went back and forth, and that statement became a statement that you can go find, just go search for Statement of Social Justice in the

Gospel, and it's been signed by tens of thousands of people by now.

So, somewhere down like, you know, 15 ,000 or 23 is my signature. I got on there and signed that as well.

Yeah, and we, it was a little bit of a headache for me. We were the ones, so the plan was, we were using my podcast to announce it.

And so, Josh Bice, back then, he was, it was going to be on, he had the website it was going to be on.

So, he and I got together, we recorded, and we recorded on a Thursday night, and the website was supposed to go live on Monday.

And I was supposed to drop it like Monday morning. And I accidentally, late at night, because I'm doing the editing, it's like three in the morning,

I accidentally hit publish. And so, Friday morning,

I'm waking up to all these messages, messages going, where's the statement one, because it didn't go live.

They're trying to get to the website. Everyone's finding out about it. And then I'm getting messages from guys like Phil Johnson going, hey,

John hasn't backed this yet. John wants to preach a couple of sermons in his church before doing this.

And I'm like, ah, so we took this thing down. So, it was like kind of the, so after that, I said, I'm not putting this back up until the website's up.

And so, it was like, so we had this thing, and it was like two or three weeks later before we finally got the website up.

So, yeah, a little bit of a snafu there, but yeah. So, I mean, we here have been against the social justice movement.

What I have seen is an attack on Christianity, and we can include

Judaism. You see that now very much, ever since October 7th. I'm really, really concerned with how many

Christians, and I understand there is a large amount of Christianity in a broad sense, reformed folk, which would probably be much of my camp, but who believe that Israel and the church are one, right, that have a view.

I wouldn't. I'm dispensational, aka biblical. Sorry, just for the rest of you out there.

And this isn't true for all covenant theologians or those who would hold to more continuity between Israel and the church, but there's definitely a move within Christianity with people who are, because they view the church as Israel, and so they don't see a purpose.

They don't see God having a purpose for Israel anymore. And even if you hold to that view, okay?

I'm not saying the view is right or wrong. I'm just saying even if you hold that view, you could still support another nation that's been attacked defending itself.

What's puzzling to me is people that want to reject Israel as a nation today because they deny any future promises to Israel.

That puzzles me, but it shows that some of this social justice stuff is finding its way into very conservative reformed circles, and I don't think people even recognize that.

I think this gets into what you were saying earlier as idols, and this would be the idol of theology, right?

This is where people put their theology on such a pedestal that, and I tried explaining to someone, they're like, there's no justification for supporting

Israel. And I said, how about justice sake? Whether it's the nation of Israel or the nation of pick your choice,

Ukraine or any other. Are you going to say that if a country comes in and attacks another country, it's wrong for them to defend themselves or retaliate, right?

Well, you raised some interesting points here. Two very, very important points. One, that we're looking at a series of movements that have

Christianity in the crosshairs. And a lot of my friends don't understand during COVID, during this whole, the woke movement was one of the edges of the spear, if you will, to create a world where you dare not speak up and challenge a system without some kind of retaliation happening to you personally.

That started happening then with gender and the idea that you can be fired because you don't want to attend, you know, some kind of seminar as to why we should all be giving people 25 different, or whatever the number is, different pronouns, whatever.

And so this is basically attacking Christianity. We're in the crosshairs. You've raised a second point of, you know, looking at the, again, the dry theological word is eschatology.

And now in the free church, when I joined years ago, one of the statements was that we were pre -millennial, that we felt strongly about that.

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I think that's sad. Pre -millennialism is really coming of age in the recent years.

Let's move over to the side of me that interfaces with scientists. I have a degree in software engineering.

Okay. So even though I'm not a scientist, I do interface with them. And some of my book does talk about science, you know, and why that's important.

And so a lot of people who are engineers and chemists and things, I love my book for that reason. But one of the points of science is to be able to predict things.

To say, well, because of a certain principle, here's a law, I'm going to do some experiments and we'll predict something.

Nobody would have predicted Israel reassembling as a nation. Nobody except the pre -millennials.

Okay. So here is, you know, pre -millennialism coming of age. Okay. Here we are.

We're the only people in the whole system that would have predicted Israel coming back as a nation.

And now the next thing is, I'll give an opinion. Okay. If you were to ask the question, okay, if the

Jewish people have nothing to do with anything anymore, they're just one more group of people out there.

Then you say, well, why the Holocaust? Why did Adolf Hitler and others try to wipe them out?

Why does that particular head of the hydra never seem to go away? Why does it keep rearing its ugly head?

My personal belief is that it's because God has a special goal for them in the future and still has things for them.

And so, they're one of the targets of Satan. If he can wipe them out, he thinks he can wipe out the end of history.

And so, that to me is one of the reasons where pre -millennialism, why it shines, you know, for those two reasons.

And why we do want to give, I believe, let's call it reference to the nation of Israel.

Now, they're human beings too. Maybe it doesn't mean that we have to endorse every single thing that any given leader of Israel wants to do at any given moment.

But as a general rule, he who blesses Abraham will be blessed. He who curses Abraham will be cursed.

And so, a Jewish friend of mine once said, Israel doesn't need the United States. And I said, you might be right, but the

United States and the rest of the world needs Israel. And so, for those reasons,

I think these are important topics and we should all try to understand them. Yeah, on my Apologetics Live program many years ago, someone,

I believe he was a professing atheist, challenged me, and he said, give me one good reason why

God would allow the Holocaust. And I went, the nation of Israel. And he just froze.

And it was like, well, okay, right? Because you think about that, folks, most people don't realize that the—and by the predates the nation of Israel and predates discussions of a nation of Israel.

Because a lot of people don't know this. Right? So, premillennialism really started late 1800s, early 1900s.

Modern expressions of it, obviously, it's always been around. Yeah, well, yeah. I did a paper in seminary on Augustine's view of revelation.

And I make the case from his writings that he believed in a literal thousand -year kingdom.

He just thought he was in it. And that's why he could be used—his arguments are used for both premillennialism and amillennialism.

Because he thought he was in it, but he thought it was a literal thousand years. And the

Catholic Church believed that up until, well, a little over 1000 AD. Wonder why. So, what we have is we have a case where you have late 1800s, early 1900s, premillennialism is starting to formulate in contrast to amillennialism and post -millennialism.

And so, premillennialism is being formalized a little bit better. But what do you have?

You have that happening before the 1900s. Why is that an important thing?

Because it was World War I, 1914, 1917, where England takes control of the area that was known as Palestine.

It was previously owned by Turkey, which, by the way, little hint for those who are paying attention, there never was a country named

Palestine. There's no language of Palestine. There's no culture of Palestine. In fact, in 1914, when the

British took over, all the Jewish people that lived in that region were called Palestinian.

So, just a little bit of history. It went from Turkish rule to British rule.

And the Brits, in about 1917, 1918, started to discuss giving that land and making it a land for Israel.

And they got a lot of pushback. And so, they backed off. So, there was talk about it before 1948.

But a lot of people don't know that. But premillennialism predates that, even if you want to say that the modern view, because people say, oh, well, it's new.

So, even if you want to argue that, it still predates it. Where did it get that prediction from? Well, from scripture.

And so, but why was it, when it was being pushed against and rejected from 1917 to 1948 for 30 years being rejected, and people were trying to push for it, and people were pushing against it, but the push against was more, well, the

Holocaust changed that. And all of a sudden, there was, well, no one stood in the way anymore.

And Israel, and so, Great Britain, the country that owned that land, created a land that they called

Israel and gave it to the Jewish people. And that's how they got it, folks.

It wasn't Israel taking it from the Palestinians, because they were

Palestinians. Yeah, and I want to be careful about getting too far afield here.

But as somebody who, when I was teaching in Newark, I taught at a school that had a large minority population.

And I think it's really, really sad. So, I'll give the standard caveat. I know a lot of people say in the African -American community, we're wonderful, wonderful people.

And we also had a lot of people who were, say, Russian immigrants, people from all over.

But it's really, really sad how much anti -Semitism is popping up in a lot of minority communities, not just the

African -Americans. And it's really sad. And some of them would call themselves Christians. Can you answer the following questions for your children or for the person to whom you are witnessing?

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And so, that's something that we really need to clarify a lot of what you're saying, because somebody's telling them that, you know, the

Jewish people are all evil and all these classic, hateful anti -Semitism things of, you know, they're running the world behind the scenes and yada, yada.

So, this is really an area where the church needs to get some clarity. And we need to be able to buck back against, you know, modern anti -Semitism.

Another little side thought for somebody who's listening, maybe they're being really patient with us, but they're from the,

I know they don't like being called amillennial, maybe covenant would be better. Some of those people are taught, well, premillennialism is awful because of Darby.

Okay. And so, we can just say, you know, premillennialism is an idea that has had different proponents.

They tried to work it out. They tried to think about the ramifications. And so, some of them were wrong. You can be premillennial and not buy into hyper -dispensationalism or some of the excesses that would say we don't need the

Old Testament or things like that. So, you can be a balanced, you can have a very balanced view of scripture, still be premillennial, you know, and see all the things we're talking about.

And that's maybe a discussion for another day if you want to have a fuller discussion of what modern dispensationalism looks like, the new dispensationalism, and all of that.

So, these are all important topics. Well, my argument, Pastor Phil, when people say to me, well, that's, you know, look at Darby.

First off, I never really, if I read Darby, I don't remember reading anything from him. Someone did point out

I did have a copy of one of his books on my shelf, so I must have read him in seminary for something.

But, you know, the argument of, well, look at Darby. Okay. Are you going to throw out covenant theology because much of it was formulated under the

Catholic Church? No. You're not going to throw that out for good reason you don't throw it.

Just because the Catholic Church was in error doesn't mean everything that the theologians within the

Catholic Church came up with is wrong. Well, I'm not going to throw out dispensationalism just because Darby might be wrong.

That'd be just a similar thing. You know, one of the things we talk about with social justice is, you know,

I think the church after the MKL 50 with the Southern Baptists, it was one of the times that, like,

Christianity was actually on the cusp of social issues.

Like, they were the first, because if you think about this, it was more conservative people within Christianity standing up speaking against social justice, and then

President Trump came out and said, we got to do away with DEI and social justice, and this stuff has to stop.

The government, the secularists were behind on us, unfortunately, and this is the thing

I think you're bringing out and I would like you to talk about a little bit more is, you know, what we see is that there was a kind of a push for Christians to speak about social justice, but then, like, after 2020, it seems, and I want you to be able to discuss this after the break here, but it seems like now it's the

Christians who are pushing this. It just seems like what we're seeing now is instead of the

Christians leading the way against the social justice movement, we're seeing the secularists catching on to the dangers of it, and the church is doubling down promoting it, and so I see that as a real concern, and so after this break,

I want to pick up there and see if we could just discuss that a bit because I think that'd be really helpful.

So, folks, if you want to get yourself awake in the morning, maybe you're sitting there a little bit sluggish, and you're saying, well, how can

I make sure that I get up and I'm awake and alert to fight the fight of Christianity, fight against this social justice movement?

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We do appreciate it. So we're with Pastor Philip Bernard.

His book that he's been mentioning is The Idols of the Hills. It is available that you can get on Amazon.

So The Idols of the Hills. Pastor Philip, let me just ask, as I was saying,

I see this trend where Christianity, some branches of Christianity saw the issues of wokeness early, stood up to fight against it.

But it sure seems like even some who were fighting against it early on are like starting to cave and starting to more and more give into it.

I think about, just as an example, a project called The American Gospel.

I don't know if you're familiar with that. I've been behind the scenes on that several times.

I've avoided being on camera. But the thing is many of the people that you saw in American Gospel 1 and even

American Gospel 2, we can't support today. Because they ended up, it's like you look at them today and go, oh, they were standing strong and now look at where they are today.

What might you attribute that to, keeping with your book, even? I mean, are there some idols that we could see people would have that may be a stumbling block for them that for the audience sake, they could look for a note to say, hey, this is something

I got to be careful of, or I got to start looking for? Okay, well, I think of three things in particular, two of which

I talk about in my book. The modern problem, as you've noted, I say it goes back to this idea of the hijack of virtue that we talked about in John, where Judas, you know, breaks open the alabaster vial, and I'm sorry,

Mary breaks over the alabaster vial and over Jesus. Judas complains.

He says, what a waste. This money could have been given to the poor. But we're told in John, no, he didn't care about the poor.

He was a thief. He wanted all the money to be sent to him. So, he weaponized virtue.

He said, well, you know, you want to be charitable, right? You care about charity, so let me handle the money and we'll take care of charity for you.

Now, it's interesting he was able to do this because charity is something that we better have very solidly a foundation in the concept of justification by faith.

The idea that if you believe in Jesus, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And that's one of the topics I talk about is how legalism creeps into our life, and we begin to see the

Christian life as I do a certain number of good things, and this secures my salvation.

So, if somebody can find some reason to make us feel guilty, that pulls on us.

That's one of those seven heads of the hydra that I talked about. And so, you better understand justification by faith very solidly, because if you don't feel guilty, you cannot be manipulated by guilt.

Okay, there is no guilt manipulation for people to understand that principle. And so, let's just say this is a real challenge for us because we have

Christian leaders who maybe don't fully understand this fundamental concept of justification by faith.

The idea that if I've prayed about it, if I've researched something, if I've really thought about it, and maybe

I make a mistake or whatever, God is not going to be angry with me. And so, there is this weakness, this ability to be manipulated that comes from a failure to understand this fundamental teaching of the

Christian faith. Now, another problem is, and it's one of the sources of idolatry, is that, and this kind of bubbled up through psychology, the idea of needs, or quote, psychological needs.

I want to suggest that there is no such thing as a need, really, unless you have a goal.

Okay, so if I want to be alive, say, a week from now, I need water in order to be alive seven days from now.

Okay, I don't need a sexual relationship. Okay, I don't need to have friends.

I can be alive seven days from now, but without water, I can't be alive. So, you can argue that water is a need.

Now, this whole idea of psychology and needs comes from the idea, and this is the whole

Maslow Pyramid, the idea that certain needs must be met so that we can self -actualize and all that.

But really, I prefer to talk about deep longings. We long for things. We want to be, most of all, loved.

And that's something that we lost in the fall, because we have a disconnect now in our relationship with God.

So, we were created to be basking in God's love, and because that's not happening, or because it doesn't feel that way as an effect of the fall, we wind up looking for cheap substitutes, and this is where the idols come in.

Maybe we look at power and what that gives to us instead, because that makes us feel important when what we really want to be is loved.

We look for pleasure, because that dulls the sense of there's something wrong in my life, something that's missing.

And so, in this case, there's what I call the God of smart, okay? That's just a real layman's term.

There is something incredibly powerful in our modern age of saying, you're stupid. You're a dummy.

You're a dunce. Those words frighten us. Everybody wants to be smart, and who wants to be smartest of all?

Well, we require our Christian leaders to be very highly educated. These are people that have master's degrees and college degrees, and then there's that wanted

DR degree that you have in front of your name. So, we have Christian leaders who want to look smart, and if you can say, ah, you're a dummy, you're somebody that you don't belong being an intellectual leader, then, you know, that really wears, most of all, on Christian leaders, because there's this little fantasy that they have because of the

God of smart, that somehow there's a party going on in the lounge of Harvard or Yale, and somehow, we would be invited.

Okay? We would be invited to that party. So, even though we're told by Paul that the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing, especially to who?

The Greeks who sought wisdom, okay? Because it's foolishness. We want to say, no, no, I'm not foolish.

Look how smart I am. Look how sensible I am. I can discuss science and all these different things, and in my book,

I discuss science, but that pulls on us because the intellectual sources, the

Harvards and the Yales, started pushing this idea of wokeism. And so, that pulls on our

Christian leaders. And so, that's one of the things that we have to free ourselves from. I have to understand that if I talk about what the

Bible teaches about humans, I'm going to look in their eyes to be a dummy. The Bible teaches that God created us in his image, and we're talking, this is page one, page two, and page three of the

Bible. That's why it's so important to us, okay? And it's very interesting, and you may recall that that first statement in Genesis is interesting because it says, in the image of God, he made them, male and female, he made them.

And in Hebrew poetry, you know that there's a statement and an expansion. And so, that's very curious that here's

God's image, and then he says, male and female. So, it's not yin and yang, that's a discussion for another day.

But there's something about being made male and female that helps us to reflect the very image of God, and that's why it's important.

That's why there are two genders. That's why marriage occurs between a man and a woman, and only a man and a woman come together and form a nuclear family.

In a broken world, sometimes, you know, one of the spouses isn't there, and other family members or community come in to help out.

But the ideal is man, woman, children. Now, if I say, so that's the standard, and if you're not following that, if you're involved in a homosexual relationship, we're told in Romans chapter 1, then you're doing something that's dangerous.

This is offensive to God. I need to be able to say to people, this is offensive to God. But the problem is, if I say it in those words,

I look dumb, and then you can push some other things that we want. We want to look nice.

We want to look kind. And somehow, we're told, oh, that's hate speech. That's bad. And so, the devil working through all these sources has gotten very, very good at wearing us down.

We want to be accepted by the smart people. And that means, you know, couching everything we say in such a way that it doesn't look like we really believe it.

And one by one, we're watching people being pulled down. Again, I can't follow people around with a video camera and know their heart.

But you look at the Andy Stanleys of the world, people like that, and we just get this, as Megan Basham points out in her book, this sense that our top leaders are now starting to get a little bit soft in how we state these things.

And I think it's because of what I'm calling the God of smart, the idea that they want to look good to the

Harvards and Yales and other intellectuals of the world. And so, we have to kind of downplay these things when, in fact, we need to be warning people.

A really quick application. I had a friend in college who boasted about his sexual conquests, okay, as college men do.

Well, one day he came to me and said, this is my before Christ days, my BC days. And he said, Phil, I'm gay.

Are you still going to be my friend? And now back because I was, you know, BC, even today, I'd say, well, sure,

I'd still be your friend. I still value you. At the time, I didn't have any reason to tell him otherwise. But what had happened was he was feeling a little bad about something.

He went to a school psychologist. In one session, she told him that his problem was that he was gay and he should begin to pursue that lifestyle.

Okay, so here's a guy who is in a vulnerable moment. He's told by a person in a white lab coat who he respects that here's the answer to his pain.

And then the rest of it, sadly, in his life was history. And so, I would like to be able to say to my friend, you have been sold a bad bill of goods.

There are some people who are participants in all these different lifestyles, transgenderism, homosexuality,

LGBT, all the letters that they're throwing on nowadays. And they are, in a sense, now they've chosen to accept it because it is their choice.

And that's one of the keys of my book, the idea that we all make choices. But the idea is that I need to be able to say to them, you've been sold a bad bill of goods.

This is not your identity. And you're doing something that is very displeasing to God.

It is sinful behavior. And you must repent. And if I cannot, at some point, say those things to them, then that's a big hunk of message that is being taken away from us as salt and light in the world.

But that's a big hunk of why a wrongheaded approach to racial reconciliation is happening.

Again, anybody who hears of the horrors, I mean, horrors took place in America, slavery, etc.

And that's one of the things I explained in my book is how a nation started by pilgrims became a nation that shortly thereafter started allowing slavery.

And that's something I think a lot of Christians need to be able to explain to people. So, I have some units in my book where I walk through that.

But it's like you hear that these horrors have taken place, you feel bad, maybe you even feel guilty.

And so, we're vulnerable. And I think that's what the devil plays upon to pull our leaders away from us in that and now in sexuality and genderism.

And so, I think that's a kind of a beginning. So, the problem of, you know, understanding justification by faith, understanding the pull that happens when we say things that are related to the gospel that the world considers to be unintelligent or foolish.

And then asking God to help us to have the strength to stand up for the clear statements of the scriptures to address these issues.

Paul I think, Phillip, a big part of this is we live in a generation that doesn't think, they feel.

And Christianity is a thinking religion. Phillip Yes. Paul God says, come let us reason together.

He doesn't say, come let us feel together. You know, when it comes to feelings, he says, your heart is deceitfully wicked, who could know it, right?

So, he says, don't trust your feelings, but think. I think this is part of what we see in modern psychology, where it says, if you start doing what's right, then you'll feel right, and then you'll think right.

And that's completely opposite to what the Bible says. The Bible says the way to change bad behaviors, start thinking right, that will affect your feelings, that will affect your behavior.

So, the world has a complete backwards. Let me just ask this as we wrap up, you know, two things.

One, from your book, give a synopsis of the different idols that you see in our culture.

And then as a way of encouragement to listeners, what should they be on the lookout for?

You, as you said, when you went to seminary, you were trained to spot things.

What should people be looking for? So, someone is sitting in their, in the pew, in their church, how would they know there's a warning sign in their church?

Okay, well, man, that's an important question. Very quickly, the Bible has in the Old Testament for, I'll call them archetype idols.

Okay, you have, for example, Dagon, who was a, really the god of the environment.

You prayed to Dagon if you wanted rain. He had the head of a man, the body of a fish.

Okay, so you take offerings. And it's very important to understand that there's a one -on -one relationship. You give things to the idols, they give you something back.

Okay, I would consider that to be roots of the modern ecological movement. Because again, I think there's lots of room for us to be stewards of our environment.

But when somebody says the planet's melting, and so you must do this, that, or the other to make the planet stop melting, that actually has its roots way back in this archetype god of Dagon, the god who controlled the rain.

The idea is that there's something that we can do. There's somebody who can sing or dance or chant, and they can change the environment.

All you have to do is pay them and give them stuff. Okay, then there's Ashtaroth. You know, you had these, that was the goddess of sex and sexuality.

That was a fertility god. And of course, we see that whole thing in the playboy movement and the modern, you know, sensual movement.

Then you had Baal, who was, you know, the idea of power, that Baal was the one you prayed to when you wanted success in war.

Okay, and finally, there was Malak. Okay, there was this detestable god, and who was a very powerful god.

And again, that was another god you would pray to if you needed power in some situation, but who demanded the sacrifice of children.

And so we see all of these gods at the root of every other god that actually has a face attached to it in the world today.

Up to things like abortion, for example, the idea that we sacrifice children for success. And these are all rooted in those things.

Now, along the way, you start seeing a transition. Okay, God, Jesus said you cannot worship both God and mammon or money.

And so the idea is there's a transition. There are statues and there's stuff. And people figured out that the statues maybe weren't as powerful as they were told, but they still wanted the stuff.

And so when you're encouraged to give wholehearted devotion to stuff and the acquisition of stuff, then that's something that creates a big problem.

In the modern world, my suggestion is that we've mentioned the god of smart, just this deep longing to be accepted, this deep longing to be important.

And one way to do that is to be smart. Now, one in America that's a really pernicious problem is what

I call the god of the better life. If you look at the pilgrims, okay, we are all taught the pilgrims, you know, came to America for religious freedom.

Well, there was a little detour along the way. The pilgrims left England that they spent some time in the

Netherlands, okay, where they actually had all the religious freedom they wanted, but they owned no property.

Okay. And so they were becoming poorer and poorer. When the king of England said, if you go to America, we'll give you property.

And so the pilgrims had certain good impulses. They could go to America and have this religious freedom, and they could start what they believed was a new pure church and a pure society.

So that was, let's call it a good motivation, whether the motivation to put a cross in the beach and all of a sudden everything becomes

Christian, that doesn't really work. But that was their motivation. Then there's the idea of saying, we will reach the indigenous peoples, what we today call, you know, the

Indians or whatever we want to call them. That was a good impulse. But then if you read their diaries, they'll then say, oh, and by the way, we get to own property.

And so there were, as much as the pilgrims were very impressive and good people, my suggestion is that two gods walked off the

Mayflower. One was Jesus Christ, but the other is what I call the God of the better life.

The idea that spirituality is good, but the really important thing is that you have stuff, okay, that you have material possessions.

And if you want to use the more standard word materialism, that's fine. But you get this problem that being well off is not a bad thing, wanting to take care of your family, wanting to pay the rent.

There's nothing wrong with that. But what happens when gods bump heads? Okay. And so the idea is that with the

God of the better life, we fast forward now to slavery. Well, slaves it was thought brought the better life.

So when these two gods bumped heads, in the minds of some Christians, slavery won.

And also the problem comes that there have always been two groups of people coming to America, one who wanted the

Christian foundations, but there have always been people who ignored all that and just wanted the riches of America.

So those two gods have always been at war in America. And that leads up to modern things like abortion.

Why do we need abortion? Because, well, here's a woman, she can't have the better life because this child's going to tie her down.

Why do we go to school? Well, school gives you the better life. To quote Cyndi Lauper, that great prophet of the 1990s, the more you learn, the more you earn.

Okay. And so is it any wonder that our schools have become temples of secularism? And so this idea that now in terms of in your church, let's say that there are certain things that are blatant, things that make you, you know, again, look at justification by faith, things where there's blatant guilt manipulation.

All of you white people get over here, you should feel guilty for being white. Okay. Well, how does that fit with Revelation 7?

How does that fit with the story of the centurion and the great feast of Abraham? Well, people will come from the east and the west.

So we want a world where we recognize that people have been hurt and we offer to help them heal, but not at the expense of other groups.

We do now take minorities and elevate them, as CRT would say, because they were the oppressed.

And then take all the oppressors and make them feel guilty and force them to give things up.

And so I would say that those are some factors that we look at. That was a very whirlwind summary of my book and some of the topics that we've been talking about that people should watch for.

Nothing wrong with being successful in life. Nothing wrong with studying hard. You can be good at whatever you do.

Solomon said in Proverbs, see a man who is skilled in what he does, he will stand before kings. So we do want to be good at what we do.

We do want to study, but at the same time, we want to be careful. How much is this pulling on us?

How much is this bumping heads with the God of Jesus Christ, who we want to worship and serve, who encourages us to use our time, our talents, and our treasures to support his work?

One final real quick example. I was talking with two people when I was up in New York.

Discussions, we were already beginning to see, this is like more than 10 years ago, drag queen story hours.

And so I said, well, of course, this is affected by who we vote for.

We're voting for people who are letting the drag queens into the libraries. And here's what one woman said.

She said, oh, I can't be involved in that. You see, because I live in New York because of rent help.

I have rent prices fixed by the state, and those Republicans will take that away.

So I can't vote for them. And so what she's saying is, who cares about what's happening to children?

Me first. And one of the important things about the true God, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he has a rod and a staff to really summarize

Psalm 23. So who is protecting us? Who is providing for us? And what she's saying is, the government is my protector and my provider.

Another individual, same discussion, came up about abortion and said, oh, abortion's bad. But you see, my union helps me to be able to live.

Without my union, I wouldn't be able to live at all. And the union encouraged me to vote for the

Democrats, for the people who support abortion. And so once again, he's saying, God cannot take care of me.

My ability to have a standard of living outweighs what happens when there's abortion and other problems supported when we support candidates, political candidates who are involved in all this.

And so I worry a lot for people in the church. It's one thing if you disagree, and I might have a profound disagreement with somebody who says, well,

I vote for liberal politicians because I care about poverty. Now we have to have a whole discussion about what is the best way to help the poor and things like that.

But I understand that. I worry a lot about people who can hear about abortion, who can hear about forced transgender operations, drag queen story hours, and can immediately say, hey, stop the bus.

Me first. I vote for the candidate who takes care of me. And we need to get people to understand, if you're doing that, your soul may be in peril because, you know, you're showing no ability to understand that God can provide for you and protect you.

His kingdom comes first and his righteousness and all these other things will be added.

And so this model of idolatry is a very helpful way to look not just at individual lives, but all of human history.

And that's why I'm hoping it'll be a modern, how should we then live, that we can give to people to develop a really solid

Christian worldview that helps them have the roots to attack all of these things that might be coming after them.

Sadly, seven -headed hydra hiding behind a Gordian's knot, I can't hit everything, but I think I can hit the roots.

Well, I appreciate the time. I hope, folks, that this has been helpful for you. I hope that you have, well, at least seen what you should be looking for to see if your church is in danger.

So, Pastor Phillip, let folks know how they can get the book, what's the best way to get the book? And also, if folks want to get in touch with you for more information, how might they be able to do that?

Okay. Well, the book is available on Amazon. Now, I'm running into more and more people who are suspicious of Amazon, and that's a shame, but I understand, and I understand, really.

Barnes & Noble also has it. And so those are the two big main standard online sources. Other sources, if you look around, have it because now it's kind of proliferating out, but it's on a publish -as -needed situation.

So when it's ordered, a certain number of copies get printed, you know, and sent out, as opposed to them being in a warehouse somewhere.

So there's that. There's also my website, philbrainerd .com. And if you want to find my works through a search engine search, you probably want to type in Phillip with two

L's, Brainerd. For some reason, Philbrainerd by itself doesn't, it's not the most effective way on the internet.

So Phillip Brainerd or philbrainerd .com. Brain in your head,

E -R -D, got me through all kinds of lines in Lifetime. That'll help you out.

Well, I thank you for coming on. I think this has been helpful for folks. I think, folks, you might want to go get that book, find it even more helpful than this, because obviously it's got way more detail than we can do in one hour.

I look forward to us getting together as part of the Truth Fellowship. We'll have more about that in the coming weeks and months here on the

WRAP Report to give you information. And just before we go, let me just give you guys an update on where I will be in case you want to be at any of the speaking events.

August 3rd and 10th, I will be preaching at Oxford Valley Chapel in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

So if you're in that area, just north of Philly, I will be there. We are working on a conference.

Well, I don't have the details yet. So I'll wait on mentioning that one. But there looks like it might be a conference that we're going to be doing out in,

I don't have the exact location, but September 5th to 7th. But I can tell you about the

Roadmap to Revival. That is September 12th to the 14th. And that one is being put on by Jeffrey Rice.

I've been to several of his conferences. And just to let you know, the speakers will be

Keith Foskey, James White, myself, Jeremiah. Wow, I just went blank on his last name, but Apologetics Dog is the podcast.

So that is going to be out in, if you just do a search for Roadmap to Revival, you'll find that one.

And I plan to be up in north New York, way north.

It's like too far north. But at Camp of the Woods with John Harris on his retreat, his men's retreat, plan on going to that.

I won't be speaking at that, but it is one that I enjoy, just the fellowship. So I'm going to be trying to go there.

So if you want to make it to any of those events, please feel free. And we will be looking forward to having you guys tune in next week.

Don't know what the topic will be yet, but as some of you know, I've been packing and moving and so been a little bit busy, but I'm sure we'll have something for you.

So Pastor Phillip, thank you for coming in. It's been great conversation, great content.

And so we appreciate that from you. Thanks for the privilege. And with that, folks, that's a wrap.