Witnessing to Cultural Marxists

We affirm that some cultures operate on assumptions that are inherently better than those of other cultures because of the biblical truths that inform those worldviews that have produced these distinct assumptions.

Take a minute to read that and think about that for a second, and I want you in this thought experiment to decide if you agree with that.

We affirm that some cultures operate on assumptions that are inherently better than those of other cultures because of the biblical truths that inform those worldviews that have produced these distinct assumptions.

Don't answer out loud, because I don't want to embarrass anybody. Okay, this is what

I call case study number one. If you think that that sounds outrageous, if you are in an outrage that somebody would say that, this message might be especially for you.

That statement is obvious and biblical to someone who understands the nature of justice, but if someone has a social justice understanding, there's an immediate red flag in saying that one culture is better than another.

Now the issue here is that culture is informed by worldview.

The Bible can inform our worldview, and therefore we will have things that are in agreement with Scripture.

For example, when the Israelites had a code of ethics and a code of morality written in Leviticus and the different books that we were given in the

Torah, those things informed the society, didn't it? It changed the way people were. There was a difference between the

Israelite culture and the cultures of the people that were driven out of the land.

Moloch worship involved the sacrificing of human babies to Moloch. It is inherently better to do what the

Israelites did in terms of preserving life than what the worshipers of Moloch did. Some cultures are inherently better insofar as what they do and assume comes from biblical principles.

So that's case study number one. We're going somewhere with this. Case study number two.

I want to put you back into your college days. If anybody here went to college or maybe went to Eastern University, all of a sudden you are transported back and you open the

Philadelphia newspaper and you see a story about an archdiocese that's kicking out homeless people from St.

Edward's Cathedral. This Catholic Church has not been used for Mass for a period of time, but the building is still there and homeless people have moved in and begun to squat in that property.

The archdiocese is giving 48 hours for them to leave. Eastern University students hear about this and they decide to head down to the church.

They hang a banner or one is hung by the people who are staying there, and it says, how can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

This is the beginning of what will be called the irresistible revolution. The founding of what's called the simple way.

My question is if you are a university student, do you join them?

Do you join in the protests? Do you demand justice for the homeless people?

What do you do? Again, the thought experiment is the differentiation between justice and social justice.

According to the morality of biblical ethics, in fact, the second table of God's law, the

Ten Commandments, the ninth commandment is not to covet your neighbor's possessions or his property.

Underlying that is the idea of private property and justice is upholding the rights of private property.

In this case, whether someone agrees with the Catholic Church or not, that's not the issue. In fact, I heard a guy at the gym the other day say, you know,

I'm tired with the Catholic Church because have you seen how much wealth they have? They own so many billions or trillions of dollars worth of real estate and different things and the question is, so what?

So what? Is that inherently wrong to own property? Is it the right, the just right for the archdiocese to not allow people to squat in their building?

In this case, justice was standing in direct opposition to social justice.

Social justice said because the Roman Catholic Church has more and these homeless people have less, it is demanded of them the just thing to do, the righteous thing to do.

We're not here talking about a category of mercy or compassion, which is a different thing, but the just thing to do is to force the

Catholic Church to let them live in that building. So social justice, in this case, undermines justice.

Now, let's follow along with what happened after that case. I believe that was in the early 2000s.

Jim Wallace and Tony Campola were the inventors of the red -letter Christian movement and they had been pressing this idea of social justice.

Jim Wallace says the great attraction of so many young people of faith today is the call of Jesus to justice.

And if we're speaking about biblical justice, we would say, well sure, that's a good thing, but what does

Jim Wallace mean by justice? Is it biblical justice or is it something else?

Tony Campola says he teaches at Eastern University, which is highly committed to doing work among the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world.

We have a special commitment to the city. It was the teaching of the red -letter Christian movement,

Jim Wallace, Tony Campola, that motivated Shane Claiborne to go and protest the kicking out of homeless people from the

Catholic Church. So let's follow along now with Shane Claiborne and some of the things that he wrote in his book,

The Irresistible Revolution. He says, sometimes we have evangelicals, usually from the suburbs, who pretentiously ask how we evangelize people.

I usually tell them that we bring folks like them here to learn the kingdom of God from the poor and then send them out to tell the rich and powerful there is another way of life being born in the margins.

Take a moment and consider that quote. Sometimes evangelicals want to know how the simple way evangelizes.

Well, after this event at the Roman Catholic Church, this group of Eastern students bought a house in the neighborhood of Kensington, and they began to live there among the people, and they would entertain short -term mission trips.

People from churches and surrounding evangelical churches would come there and sometimes would ask, how do you evangelize?

I want you to look at this definition and see if the definition of evangelism given by Shane Claiborne includes any of the elements of the

Ewangelion, the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel of Jesus Christ is who Jesus is, the person of Christ, and what he has done, his death, burial, resurrection from the dead.

It includes the scriptures. It's according to the scriptures. It's the offering of forgiveness of sin and eternal life to those who will repent of sin and believe the good news.

This is the gospel. The first thing Jesus said when he preached the kingdom of God, repent and believe the good news.

This is our gospel. But where is it found in the way

Claiborne responds to evangelicals who wanted to know where the gospel is in the ministry of the simple way?

Well, maybe it's just not mentioned here. So we continue on. If by evangelical we mean one who spreads the good news that there is another kingdom or superpower, an economy and a peace other than that of the nations, a savior other than Caesar, then yes,

I am an evangelical. So we see that Shane Claiborne identifies himself as an evangelical, but he's using unusual language to do so.

It looks more like the overthrow of empire, the revolution that changes a society from one thing to another.

It doesn't say much about Christ and his cross and his blood.

But again, maybe that's just an omission. He does favor missions. So we see in his final quote here on the first page,

I am going to Iraq as a missionary. In an age of omnipresent war, it is my hope that Christian peacemaking becomes the new face of global missions.

In his book, The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne makes much of the trips that he's done.

He's gone to Calcutta and spent ten weeks with Mother Teresa. He went to Iraq and endured the bombings of American troops upon the

Iraqi people as he describes it. He suffered with them, identifying in their plight, and he says that this kind of work,

Christian peacemaking, should become the new face of global missions.

Here's what's dangerous. Tony Campolo, Jim Wallace, the Red Letter Christian Movement, Shane Claiborne, Bart Campolo, this group of teachers that were prominent in the early 2000s were claiming to be evangelical

Christians, and they came into many evangelical churches and taught our young people. They spoke at conferences.

They taught evangelical Christians about the gospel, but it's a bloodless gospel.

There's no sacrificial blood on the count of sinners, in the stead of sinners.

You say, okay, well, this is kind of an argument from silence. I don't hear Claiborne in this particular place denying that we should also preach blood atonement, the cross, and the resurrection.

Maybe I'm being a little too harsh on his teaching. So I did a little bit more research, turned to the next page.

The Christian peacemaking teams that he goes with explicitly say, while CPTers, Christian peacemaker teams, have chosen to follow

Jesus Christ, they do not proselytize.

They do not seek conversion of any Muslim in Iraq to the

Christian faith. They explicitly do not proselytize. While core members are

Christian, there is no faith requirement for members of CPT's short -term delegations.

For example, one of the CPT delegates who was held hostage in Iraq, Harmeet Singh Sudden, was a

Sikh. He was not a Christian. The great danger of social justice being brought into the evangelical church and defined as gospel truth is the distortion of the gospel itself.

It is not only the downplaying of the gospel, but the complete elimination of the gospel. These Christian peacemaker teams explicitly do not seek to convert anybody from a different religion to Christianity, and yet they hang the banner over themselves of Christianity and the gospel.

It's a dangerous, dangerous movement. Guys, we're here at an apologetics conference. 1

Peter 3 15 tells us, always be ready to give an answer, a reason, and defense, an apologia, an apologetic for the hope that we have.

We need to be Bereans who are equipped to defend the gospel of the

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I lived in the same neighborhood that Shane Claiborne lived in.

From 2004 to 2016, we did ministry in inner -city Philadelphia, and we lived there for a majority of the time.

We saw dozens and dozens of baptisms, people converted from false ideologies to the

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But you know, over the course of the last 15 years, a little less than 15 years, we've had people come to faith, and of those dozens who came to faith and were baptized, some of the people that I baptized in Kensington have apostatized from the faith, and every single one of them can be traced to social justice teaching.

One of them went to a university, began to date a social justice warrior, and she got involved in that, and before long she completely left the faith.

Another began to be influenced by the racial teachings in the inner city that white people are inherently, by virtue of being white, racist against blacks.

He turned against the religion that he was taught by mostly white missionaries and became a

Muslim. Another became a Muslim for the same reason in prison. In fact, one time

I debated in the city a Muslim imam, and as we sat and talked,

I would make a point about Islam, about the the Arabic infancy gospel of Thomas, and how that informs the 19th surah that Muhammad writes, and how it's not at all an interaction with the biblical gospel, but it is informed by Gnostic writings.

His response was not to address that point, but to go to the issue of race.

The debate was a farce, because whenever I would bring a point that's logical and biblical, he would bring up the issue of race.

That Jesus could not have been the Savior of the world, otherwise he could only die for the sins of people like him.

He would have a skin color, which would identify him more with that particular skin color, and not others, and that was his argument against the atoning blood of Christ.

When in fact, we all descend from Adam, and the new

Adam, the one race that comes from Adam is one blood.

We all descend. There is no such thing as race in that sense. Race is a social construct.

There are ethnicities, but we all descend from Adam. Those of us who believe the gospel and the

Bible as its teaching, the enemy is using social justice teaching to distort the gospel of Jesus Christ, to downplay it, and even to silence the teaching of it, because if you come to Iraq preaching that there is a

Savior, that his name is Jesus, and he is absolutely the Savior of the world, you are importing something

Western to Iraq that is ethnocentric, that is xenophobic. You can't imperialistically bring your religion and impose it on another person.

You are an oppressor if you preach Christ, and in fact, the teaching of social justice, we'll get to this in the notes, is opposed to the

Christian message at the core. It's meant to silence people to no longer speak the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's the first danger. The second you'll find is that not only, and this

I'll ascribe good motives here, although it's not necessarily true that the motives of the people who are doing this are good, but I'll ascribe good motives, and I'll say, listen, there are unintended consequences to every social justice action that a person does.

Someone might have good motives and be trying to help, but there are unintentional consequences.

There was a book called When Helping Hurts. In the case of short -term missions to Iraq, a man named

Horowitz did a research and created a website, and Robert Huff wrote about it in Discovering the

Networks of the Christian Left. Here's what he writes. Given Claiborne's reputation as a

Christian peace activist, it would be helpful if he explained the extent of his solidarity with groups like VOM, Voices in the

Wilderness, CPT, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and especially ISM, International Solidarity Movement.

If he is unwilling to distance himself from these organizations, then his followers should proceed with extreme caution.

Instead of finding freedom, they may find themselves being led on yet another futile attempt to establish an earthly Marxist utopia.

You need a little background to know what that's talking about. CPT was partnered with VOM, an organization that was founded during the years of Bill Clinton.

This was left of Bill Clinton, and what they did was in helping, quote -unquote, the

Palestinian people, they advocated on their behalf against Israel, against the

IDF, and they went to Iraq as a show that they would defy the sanctions imposed by Bill Clinton against Iraq in the 1990s.

It was an entirely political maneuver, entirely political, and the final result, the end analysis of what they were doing, is that they stood in solidarity with the other side.

Now, it's open to debate, and people can politically debate the differences between Israel and the

Palestinians and the Arabs who surround them. That's something that would have to be discussed and researched.

But from the research that I've done, I think Israel is the one being oppressed. I think

Israel is the one that's being attacked, and justice would be to stand for the oppressed and the attacked.

In what they were doing, while they claimed it as Christian missionary work, they were actually doing a political leftist maneuver.

And I would encourage you to go to Robert Huff's Discovering the Networks of the Christian Left at the

American Thinker. Read his article. It's in your notes. Social justice claims to help the poor, to deliver the oppressed, but there needs to be consistency, and there needs to be an understanding that there are unintended consequences that come with any political action that you give.

We'll get into those again in a minute. So here's the main idea of what I want to communicate today. Cultural Marxism, and I get this

Marxist word from that last quote. I'm going to define it. That'll be the first thing

I do. Cultural Marxism subtly influences a majority of Americans, even an increasing number of evangelicals.

It religiously animates a majority of college students and recent graduates. It dominates cities, media, and entertainment, and it fundamentally opposes

Christian witness. So it must be met with evangelistic confidence, presuppositional apologetics, gospel clarity, and intellectual persuasiveness, as well as prophetic,

God -centered, polemical, relevant, authoritative witness empowered by the Holy Spirit. We'll get into each of those things, but the first thing

I'll do is define cultural Marxism. Then number two, I'll show the influence.

We'll look at how pervasive is this. We talk about evangelizing Mormons. That would be a big deal if we were going to Utah, and that is a big deal, because the

Mormon faith is fundamentally opposed to the Christian faith, but do we realize the influence of what's right here in our neighborhoods?

How strong is cultural Marxism, and is it even a religion? Number three, we'll see how it opposes

Christian witness. And finally, four and five, we're going to look at some.

We won't have time to go in depth. It's really applying standard witnessing, but with an understanding of what we're up against.

That will be the ending. So I won't have that much time to spend on four and five, but listen, if we can understand what we're up against, we are better equipped to share the gospel.

So first, cultural Marxism, I'll give you a definition. This comes from GotQuestions.

By the way, if you have a question about Christianity, GotQuestions is usually pretty spot -on. Go to that website, type that question in, and you might be able to find it.

It's a very helpful one. Cultural Marxism is a revolutionary, think Shane Claiborne, irresistible revolution.

It's an idea, a revolutionary leftist idea, that traditional culture is the source of oppression.

Keyword, oppression, in the modern world. Cultural Marxism is often linked to an insistence on political correctness, multiculturalism, and perpetual attacks on the foundations of culture.

The nuclear family, marriage, patriotism, traditional morality, law and order, etc.

That's our working definition of cultural Marxism. Now, it's important to define our terms because other people might mean other things by it.

Now, I do recognize that there is a school of economics after World War II and after the failure of Marxism in America that came to America called the

Frankfurt School, and that is cultural Marxism proper. Here, we're working off of this definition, which would include that, but let's really lay a foundation for those of you who are not that familiar with Marxism in order to know what cultural

Marxism is. Let's lay a foundation. First of all, what is Marxism? The Marxist worldview is built upon two presuppositions, and both of them are wrong.

Marxists assume that human beings are essentially morally neutral. That's why they believe they can create a utopia, that if people were just given fair and equal opportunity that the world would be good.

Yeah, they did try it already. Marxists assume that society as we know it is a class struggle, so here's the fundamental idea of Marxism, that you have the wealthy people who own the means of production, whether it's a factory or they just have the capital in order to make things happen, and these, the bourgeoisie, are oppressing the proletariat.

You have the rich oppressors who are holding down the common working man.

Workers of the world unite. It is a class struggle at root, whereas capitalism has a very different view of the world.

It assumes human fallenness and operates on the basis of individual human self -interest, and that's the driving engine.

Self -interest then becomes the driving engine behind the capitalistic model. But the Marxist model has fundamentally assumed victimization.

That the rich are rich because they oppress, and the poor are poor because they are oppressed.

They are the victim of the bourgeoisie. This was the Marxist revolution. This is what defined really the 20th century struggle between Russia and America, and we know which one prevailed.

Remember, tear down this wall. That was the the crumbling of the Soviet Union around 1988.

Now listen, that Marxist worldview ultimately failed in America, didn't it?

There were plenty of Marxists on college campuses trying to push this in the 1920s and 30s, but it failed because in America people recognized that there are opportunities to advance.

There are opportunities to gain, and they had a more biblical understanding of justice.

Understanding that there is a such thing as private property, that that's built on the ninth commandment of God. In the table, the second table of God's law.

And so Marxism failed. However, the Marxists did not just go away. As that struggle continued, they entered the universities, and they began to teach

Marxism, and found that the way to grow their movement was to recruit allies from a number of different cross -sections of humanity.

And so here's what happened. The bourgeoisie versus the proletariat. The rich versus the poor.

The class struggle. Oppressor and victim. That construct began to enter into every area of life.

And cultural Marxists pressed this wherever they could. So follow with me.

There's wealth. And here again, we'll hear about the 1%.

Occupy Wall Street. Corporate America. The oppressors of the poor.

Demonizing anybody who has a certain arbitrary amount of wealth. That was the first line of Marxism.

But they recruited allies as well through racial identity politics. You'll hear about white privilege.

Minority oppression. Black Lives Matter. Racial segregation.

Affirmative action. Reparations. Unseen subconscious systematic systemic,

I'm sorry, oppression. Minorities cannot be racist.

Now is there racism in America? Yes! And we hate it, and we despise it.

And there are white supremacists that we completely renounce. But here's the point.

Cultural Marxists will take this opportunity to divide and press this narrative that all white people are racist.

And they will look to every minority to identify as a victim and revolt against the system.

To identify as a victim of oppression. And again, watch this. Each case that you see, it is oppressor versus victim.

Oppressor versus victim. So the third category is gender. We'll hear much language about patriarchy.

Feminism. The gender pay gap. Toxic masculinity. Rape culture.

Affirmative consent. Affirmative action. There are no gender roles. Believe women.

In any one of these cases there are issues that derive from truth.

There are people who abuse other people. But the narrative of the cultural

Marxist is that masculinity itself is toxic. That women are fundamentally oppressed by men.

Oppressor and victim. And the opportunity that they are looking for in this identity politic is to press that division and to stoke that controversy and to rile up people to identify themselves as victims of oppressors.

Fourth, sexuality. LGBTQ uber rights. That's rights beyond what would be expected by the ordinary definitions of justice.

Sexual minorities, as if that's a thing. Obergefell was the redefinition of marriage.

Whereas God has defined marriage, Obergefell, the Supreme Court decision, has redefined marriage.

To say that would make someone what? Homophobic. There's queer theory.

Gender as a social construct. Non -binary gender fluidity. That gender is no longer,

God made them male and female, but there is a complete spectrum of gender. And it's really a matter of a person's preference where they define themselves along those lines.

And there's to be gender neutrality. Not speaking in terms of a binary. Of course, we know that gender is a binary and sexuality is actually fluid.

Meaning people can change in terms of what they're attracted to, what they desire, how they think.

A person can become more and more perverted in their thinking or they can actually be set free of perversion.

According to 1st Corinthians 6, speaking of homosexuality, Paul says what? And such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were cleaned, sanctified, changed. God is actually able to change proclivities.

God is able to do that. But their narrative is precisely opposite. That if someone is born a certain way, that can't change.

It is a lie. And finally, the fifth construct where this oppressor and victim construct is enforced is with regard to nationality.

Those who would identify as a particular or to belong to a particular culture, say you're an

American, for that opening statement that we read from the statement on social justice, we'll get to that at the end, you're called xenophobic for saying that one culture is better than another.

You're ethnocentric. Because America is fundamentally colonialist, imperialist.

We speak of cultural appropriation, immigration rights, globalism.

There is an intentional effort to divide Americans between the oppressor and the oppressed, as much as possible to get people to identify in the class of victim in order to overthrow.

So finally, in this area of introduction, it's a long definition.

This is the problem. We have to understand the problem. So we'll go back to this idea of social justice. Social justice.

I don't know if we could make it a perfect parallel with cultural Marxism, but the ideas are very much overlapping.

Social justice. Warring for justice without first warring for truth is dangerous religion.

Social justice warriors war for a cause. But they are absolutely unwilling to debate the truthfulness of the underlying claim.

The truth is we are in a truth war. A truth war, not a justice war, because unless truth first of all defines what is just, we cannot pursue justice.

We are in a truth war, but social justice assumes their point.

Where did it come from? Jesuit priest Luigi Tapparelli coined the term in the early 1800s.

Karl Marx was very much influenced by it, and of course we know where that led.

Catholic social teaching actually adopted it and spread it especially through Latin America, and many of the liberation theologies, black liberation theology, a number of liberation theologies appropriated it and brought it into Protestantism.

It was sort of a sideshow in evangelicalism even through the days that we've talked about, the early 2000s, until the recent decade.

Nowadays, it's actually coming into mainstream evangelicalism because the culture is buying into it, taking hold of it, and it's becoming perhaps a majority of our culture who believe this concept of social justice.

How does PragerU define social justice? I thought this is one of the better definitions I've seen.

Social justice is code for good things no one needs to argue for and no one dare be against.

Here's the issue. Social justice, the rightness of whatever the cause might be, is assumed.

It's assumed. It's not something, and it sounds right because none of us are against race.

I mean, none of us are for racism, or the oppression of women, or the taking away of rights from people who have sexual differences.

None of us are for that, so it sounds so good and righteous. To stand for social justice.

But the actual truth claims underlying those issues are never addressed. They are assumed, and if anybody dares speak against it, they are automatically labeled as homophobic, or xenophobic, an imperialist, or whatever the oppression is assumed to be.

I was born in 1977. The year before I was born, an economist was saying the same thing that I'm saying today.

His name is Hayek, Frederick Hayek. I love the strength of his language because he was seeing the danger even way back then.

I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow man would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term social justice.

What was Hayek seeing back in 1976? Well, here's the coming great danger.

The assumption is that the state must remedy, and can remedy, all perceived wrong.

Anyone who disagrees is an enemy. The state must coerce them. That is the root of totalitarianism.

That is the danger of revolution. Turning not just cultural, but once again, full -on, full

Marxist. And it could very well be coming. So how pervasive is this?

Cultural Marxism religiously animates a majority of college students and recent grads.

It enlists foot soldiers in the cities, it dominates media, entertainment, and politics, and it subtly influences a majority of Americans, even in the church.

Washington Times reports, the majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist, or fascist nation than a capitalistic one.

That should make us gasp in horror, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation's annual report on U .S. attitudes towards socialism, 58 % of the up -and -coming generation opted for one of three systems, compared to 42 % who said they were in favor of capitalism.

The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism, and 44%. Communism and fascism received 7 % support each.

See, the problem is, well, there's a lot of problems, but one of them is that our young people don't understand history, they don't read history, they don't know about Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, and the result of communism and socialism.

A hundred million dead as a result of it from the last century. That's the problem on college campuses and recent grads, but listen, it is also so prevalent, it's almost definitional to inner -city

America. Believe me, I speak from someone who's lived there for a long time, who did live there for a long time.

In 59 districts in Philadelphia in 2012, Barack Obama received over 18 ,000 votes to Mitt Romney's zero.

Now, believe it or not, I don't raise that for political reasons, and I don't even raise it for the reason of voter fraud, because many people have pointed out that there's a statistical problem with that, which

I would agree with, because living there, I did know a number of Republicans who lived in those places, so there could have been voter fraud.

That's not my point. My point is with this kind of overwhelming majority, I guarantee you this, people are not taking one platform, let's say the

Republican platform, and the other platform, the Democratic platform, and going point by point and deciding on justice based on truth.

They are not looking at the issues and how each platform stacks up against each other, because I know many of these people, and many people love the

Lord, but they are not looking at the Republican platform and comparing it to the

Democratic platform. Rather, they're being told that this culture in which we live is fundamentally racist, and it's the great injustice of our time, and the

Democratic platform is upholding racial justice, whereas the Republicans are a bunch of racists and bigots, and then you get 18 ,000 to zero.

So my question is, how much influence does cultural Marxism have in cities?

Just based on those numbers, how much influence does cultural Marxism have in our culture?

I'll give one more thought experiment by being slightly cryptic, but I think you'll read through what I'm saying.

Turn with me to Deuteronomy 19, verse 15 to 21. A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed.

Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established. If a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the

Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days. The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and has accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother.

So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and the rest shall hear in fear and shall never again commit any such evil among you.

I want to focus on the jurisprudence of Israel, that a crime being committed needs to be established and proven with corroborating evidence of two or three witnesses.

Turn with me to Genesis chapter 39, verse 17. You'll recognize this story.

The cultural Marxist line is to believe women. But biblical justice says whether it's a man accusing a woman or a woman accusing a man, do justly.

And that includes something called due process, what we just read in Deuteronomy 19.

Examine corroborating evidence, come to the matter. Otherwise, don't bring that accusation.

In Genesis 39, verse 17, she told him the same story, saying, the

Hebrew servant, who's that? Right, Joseph, whom you have brought among us, came into me to laugh at me.

She charges Joseph with wrongdoing, and yet she lied.

In current political situations, I don't know who's lying. I have no way of knowing that.

We can all make the best estimations that we can. But here's the thing, biblical justice would involve due process and what is here taught as a biblical jurisprudence.

But cultural Marxism supplants biblical definitions of justice. It is to assume, believe women, to assume that at the start.

And my question is, are more Americans interested in justice or social justice? I think we're going to see that in coming weeks.

Is it a majority or a minority? Unless there's some corroborating evidence that comes out, we'll have to wait and see.

But here's my larger point before we move on to number three. This problem is much bigger than most people realize.

Cultural Marxism is dominating this country. It is affecting far more than people realize.

And so we look at why that's such a problem. It fundamentally opposes Christian witness. Cultural Marxism teaches that human beings are essentially morally neutral.

Rather than coming from a theistic perspective, a theistic point of view, that there is a holy God in heaven, and here

I am on earth. I'll let my words be few. And before that holy God were to be humbled and to recognize that our comparative righteousness with him is filthy rags and come to this point of repentance and faith in him, that's a theistic worldview.

But this is a fundamentally atheistic worldview that simply says, compare to one another.

And everybody is basically good. The fundamental assumption of Marxism, people are good.

Cultural Marxism teaches that most people are essentially victims. And here is an anti -gospel fruit of the movement.

Cultural Marxism ingrains in people's mind that you are a victim, you are a victim, you are a victim, whereas God through his gospel says, repent, repent, repent.

They stand in exact opposites of one another. The drumbeat of the culture is inoculating people to the gospel.

Rather than coming to this point of brokenness, of personal responsibility before a holy God, they are rising up and feeling emboldened and empowered as a victim to fight injustice, which they're not even willing to go to war for on the level of truth.

To find out what justice would be in any given situation. Third, cultural

Marxism teaches that Christianity represents oppression of the poor, oppression of non -whites, oppression of women, oppression of sexual minorities, and oppression of foreigners.

You see, we are not living in ancient Rome, where Paul goes to Thessalonica or Berea or Athens and for the first time preaches the gospel.

And people sit there and listen and they weigh and balance and they think about it. No, we are living in post -Christian

America, where people have been inoculated to the gospel. They have this cultural understanding of Christianity.

And here is what the narrative of the cultural Marxist is doing. It's coming in and saying that that culture, that bygone era, that America of colonialism and henceforth from 1776 right up until the 21st century, that that was fundamentally oppressive.

It is relegating Christianity to a vestige of the past and a regrettable one at that.

It's saying that Christianity is the problem. It might say America is the problem, but the devil's intention in all of this is for people to recognize and to believe falsely that Christianity is the oppressive force of humankind.

And so whether somebody is different from another person at any level, cultural

Marxists will press that difference and remind them that it's Christianity that's been holding them down.

It's preachers like myself, and I say that preachers should be men in accordance with the scriptures.

1 Timothy 2, 11 to 15, it's what the Bible says. 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Corinthians 11, it's what the

Bible teaches, that an elder is to be the husband of but one wife. But the cultural

Marxist says that it's those Christian preachers that hold women down. You see the problem?

It's at its root an attack on Christianity. Number four, cultural Marxism teaches that help from government rather than individual salvation is the hope of the world.

They have another savior, not only another Christ. This savior, which is not

Jesus, is government. Government will come in and rescue you.

The UN explicitly says, present day believers in an absolute truth, identified with virtue and justice, are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.

The UN recognizes that biblical Christianity, established upon the word of God, is an enemy of government totalitarian takeover, and the globalism which the

UN seeks. Finally, probably most severely, cultural

Marxism teaches that justice means autonomy. Autonomy.

Now listen, real justice would defend innocent life. But social justice, which is a modification of plain old justice, is religiously demonically animated.

Babies are being sacrificed to Moloch, and that Moloch is called convenience.

In the name of human autonomy, a woman's right to choose what she does with her own body.

For the sake of her own autonomy, she is willing to sacrifice an infant within her body for the sake of her own convenience.

That raising this child would be too difficult for her. The constraints of that little girl or boy inside of her would put upon her autonomy are too much a threat to that autonomy to let that boy or girl live.

This culture's biggest idol is autonomy. To exist independent of God.

To live as an autonomous being, as the center of one's own universe.

Not to have a God over them, who would define justice and truth, but to set that determination for oneself.

That idolatrous autonomy, not justice, is what motivates a social justice warrior. If someone were truly in pursuit of justice, they would engage these issues at the level of truth, and then pursue justice on the basis of truth.

But at every point, what they're really after is autonomy. It's directly opposed to God.

Barack Obama in 2002 argued that if a baby is born through a botched abortion, when an abortion fails, that baby should be left to die.

A living baby, here's his actual words. Adding an additional doctor, who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments, is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

I think it's important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.

The moral compass of these words is so perverted, and so backwards, and so wrong, that it is exactly the opposite of justice.

Abortion is obviously and clearly the single greatest injustice in this country, where human beings, persons made in the image of God, are killed by the hundreds of thousands in this country every year.

60 million over the course of the year since Roe versus Wade. Now it's up to 1973.

This is the great injustice, and that's at a societal level. If we're going to talk about social justice in terms of applying justice in the societal structures, in society in general, then every social justice warrior should be putting it into abortion, but you see the exact opposite.

It's truly a pursuit of autonomy. And so that's where we are.

I don't have long left. I'm going to take about 15 minutes to apply what we have learned to gospel witness, because we've had these conversations for years.

And in fact, right now I'll do it. I want to refer you to a statement that was recently written, mostly by John MacArthur and James White, Votie Bauckham.

Tom Askell, I think, was one of the primary crafters. It's called, on the last page there, go to the statement on socialjustice .com.

Statement on socialjustice .com. I want you to read the articles there to learn more about this subject and consider signing it.

We've had these arguments. We've been in the trenches in this issue, but what

I haven't heard a lot talked about is the fact that a majority of Americans are culturally

Marxist to some level. They're being influenced by this thinking.

And here is the Christian response to that problem. To preach the gospel, to love your enemy.

Even a person like Barack Obama, who would say something like that, I don't wish harm on him. I want someone to go sit down with him and explain the gospel of Jesus Christ.

How do we leave this apologetics conference and not just go shaking our heads indignant but say, no.

The enemy is moving in this country and I refuse to sit by and watch this country be destroyed.

More than that, every individual that's on the way to hell because they are deceived by the lies of the enemy,

I want to go and preach truth to them. Let's take this conversation beyond.

Let's motivate evangelicals to say, all right, we see what the devil is doing. Mormonism is a little problem in Utah.

And Jehovah's Witnesses are a little problem in some of the inner cities and in certain communities. And you have the

Oneness Pentecostals and whatever the different cult groups are. But a majority of this culture, even if they're

Muslim, like my friends, they're not there because they've ever studied the truth of Christianity versus Islam.

It couldn't stand up for five minutes. Watch a David Wood video. It's not the issue of truth. In those cases, it's an issue of race and social justice and cultural

Marxism. Who will go with the gospel of Jesus Christ and preach the truth? How do we do that?

So I've given you some resources. I think it looks a lot like Acts chapter 17. We learn in Acts 17, when

Paul goes to Thessalonica, it says, as was his custom, he went into the synagogue and began to reason.

We need to create a custom of evangelism, where instead of passively sitting by, watching

TV, observing the culture, we are the people who are going out, interacting with people, and actually bringing up the name that is above every name, the name of Jesus.

Somebody needs to tell them about that blood that he put on the cross to pay for sin. And if they will believe, that blood atones their sin.

And they are forgiven of their sin, and they have eternal life. To call them to repentance and faith, we need some evangelistic zeal.

We need to get confident and go out. We learn that from Paul, it was his custom. Number two, presuppositional apologetics.

Notice in Acts 17, you can turn there if you like, or else look it up later. Paul reasons from the scriptures.

His evangelism is built on the word of God. He doesn't cede the ground and say, well, we'll just come to some neutral place without the scriptures and try to argue our way to belief in Jesus.

Rather, he comes from scripture, believing that it's the word of God that is the power of God. It won't return void.

Your words, your reasoning, that's gonna return void. You won't find many converts. It's only when the power of God, which he often uses through his scripture, brings people to faith.

Be ready to defend the entire scripture. Number three, gospel clarity. Recognize it's only the power of God in the gospel that brings people to faith.

Just go preach Christ and him crucified and risen. And recognize that even among a hostile people, there will be sheep that will hear his voice.

God will regenerate them. They will hear his voice and they will come. The problem is we're just not speaking.

So what is gospel clarity? It's understanding what the gospel is. You bring the genuine thing.

There's a lot, you don't need to memorize everything that we talked about today. Just let it motivate you. Let it motivate you.

What you do need to memorize, what you do need to know, like the back of your hand, is what the gospel is.

The person of Christ, the son of God, the triune being who created all things, who came, was born in the flesh, and walked among us, and obeyed

God perfectly. And through his passive obedience, he was crucified for the sins of the world as a substitutionary atonement.

He died and he rose from the dead, and he's alive. And he offers you forgiveness of your sin.

If you'll repent and turn to him in faith. That's what we need to understand and be ready to share.

At the drop of a hat, gospel clarity. But we do need intellectual persuasiveness.

Notice it says in Acts 17, in Thessalonica, that many were persuaded.

Go talk to people, have a conversation, ask them questions. Questions like, how do you know what is real?

What is truth? Are you truly happy? How's that working for you?

What if what the world is pushing is a lie? See, I say ironically, we actually now have the advantage of being the underdog in this culture.

We're the dinosaurs. We're the ones that are few in number. It's no longer a culture that identifies as evangelical.

29 % claim to be, but even among those, it's far less than that. Remember what happened when

Carson Wentz went down last year on the way to the Super Bowl? The Eagles started putting on an underdog hat.

An underdog mask. They still had the best team. And they went on to win the

Super Bowl without Carson Wentz. But see, there was something driving them. They were the underdog.

In this culture, just recognize, we are underdogs. There are very few workers, but the harvest is plentiful.

Go out there with that kind of knowledge, knowing that you can preach Christ and God can use you to do it.

Finally, witness like Paul did in Athens. He goes to Athens.

A culture, we'll talk about this in the sermon. For all you Cornerstone people, this is the sermon tomorrow, so I'm not gonna spoil it.

Athens is so much like America. It's idolatrous, it's multicultural. So many ways you see

Athens is just like America. But Paul walks in there and he speaks this almost prophetic kind of word.

He notices a tomb, I mean, an idol to an unknown God, and he applies that.

And I can just imagine every Athenian who sees that from day to day, just thinking to himself, yeah,

I've seen that unknown God. And all of a sudden, their mind is just starting to think. Paul was led by the

Spirit to say words like that. When we go out evangelizing, we need to be praying,

Lord, help me to say something that's gonna connect. That's gonna just get like a craw in somebody's brain.

Prophetic, we need to be led by the Spirit, God -centered. Paul backs it up a step in Athens, and he explains that there's a

God that created all things. In this culture now, we need to back it up a step and say, who created everything?

Who is God? Begin with God in your evangelism, that he's a creator, all things were made by him.

Third, I think we can be polemical. In Athens, Paul had a strong verbal attack against idolatry.

He came right out and he hit it hard. We are able to do that against the idols of people, to expose those things as false by facts and logic, but most of all by scripture.

Remember what some of the prophets of old did? Mocking the gods of the nations.

Remember Elijah on Mount Carmel? Maybe he's going to the bathroom. Maybe he's sleeping. Isaiah talks about the idols just being made by hands, and they're just a block of wood.

We need to become polemical. We need to be able to address people on the issues. Relevant, just because we attack false ideas, we're not attacking them.

We need to be winsome people in our conversations with others. Paul will even quote from Epimenides and Eratus, trying to show that that theism that they espoused was good.

That there is one God and we're all his offspring. Look for points to connect with people. But finally, be authoritative.

The whole point of cultural Marxism is to say, shame on you and be quiet. Shame on you and be quiet.

You're the oppressor, be quiet. Shame on you for your Christianity that tries to impose itself on other people's religions, which are equally valid as yours.

Shame on you, be quiet. We need to go out in the authority of God and preach Christ.

Boldly, authoritatively, Paul will say at the end of that sermon, God commands all people to repent.

All people everywhere, repent and believe the good news. So I'd encourage you to go sign that statement on social justice if you agree with it.

Take your time through it, understand it. There's plenty of articles posted in support of it. I want to pray for us and I want to pray for people who are influenced by this culture.

The cultural Marxism that's pressing these ideas that fundamentally oppose the

Christian faith. Let's pray. Father, I pray for us that we would learn to be like Paul. We know we cannot witness like we just talked about in our own strength.

We need your Holy Spirit to empower us. Spirit of the living God, come empower us to be witnesses.

Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. Here we are at the ends of the earth and still today we need your

Holy Spirit. We cannot reach anybody with the gospel in our own flesh. And God, we pray for those who are being told that they are a victim.

Maybe they are. Lord, we pray for true victims who have been hurt by others. We pray that you would heal them.

Sinners are not only sinners but sufferers. Because sin is in this world, people suffer at the hands of others.

And we pray for those who are hurting. But I pray, Lord, that they will not identify in that pain, create their identity there as victims, and thus harden themselves to you.

We pray, Lord, that you will send us out to meet with people. That they can receive the good news that we have also received.

We have nothing that we did not receive. So, Lord, I pray for those who are influenced by cultural

Marxism, who are being told by the media, by politics, and especially by university professors, that they are victims, that Christianity is oppression.

I pray that you will open their eyes, that they can see. You know those who are yours, Lord. You are able to do this.