Dr. Russell Moore's Clinic on How NOT to do it. (Part 1)

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Dr. Russell Moore's Clinic on How NOT to do it. (Part 2)

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I always love it when people retweet themselves. That's how you know it's serious. Ultimately, it really comes down to two questions.

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And two questions that the scripture speaks to repeatedly in the

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Old and New Testaments. And those questions are, who is my neighbor? What is the gospel?

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To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Signposts podcast or check it out at erlc .com.

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I don't really think those are the two right questions, but hey, I'll hear them out. Let's see what we got here.

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E -R -L -C dot com. All right, let's see what we got here.

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How do you find this? E -R -L -C dot com. Where is it? Oh my goodness gracious, where, why can't

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I just see it instantly? Mm -hmm -hmm, da -da -da -da, da -da -da -da.

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Oh, I need to find, where is the podcast? I don't understand.

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Am I just like not seeing this? I don't get this. No, maybe this is it. Yeah, this is it.

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Hello, this is Russell Moore and you're listening to Signposts. When you hear music like that, you know it's gonna be very, very serious.

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So anyway, this will be, we'll do a couple of parts of this most likely. I don't know how long it is because it won't show me on the screen here, which

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I find extremely annoying. But you know what? Maybe if I click this, it'll, yeah, yeah, all right, perfect.

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So here we go. Let's just start this bad boy up again. Hello, this is

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Russell Moore and you're listening to Signposts. I had a listener ask me the other day, what about the various controversies that can come up from time to time about whether or not the gospel has anything to do with social justice?

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He had a listener, just one. And my response to that is first of all to say, there really aren't any controversies out there about whether or not the gospel has anything to do with social justice.

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Yes, there are. Because obviously it depends on how you define social justice.

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So that is just such an annoying little rhetorical trick. I don't think anybody falls to that except for the real zealots, which they'll fall for anything at this point.

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But yeah, that's annoying. I mean, Dr. Moore, if this is the best you can do, I mean, come on, man. Because I challenge you to find anyone who actually in practice would deny that the gospel does not have implications for social justice.

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I would because we all know what we mean by social justice. We're talking about income inequalities, wealth inequalities, oppressor oppression, oppressor oppressed just by nature of your skin color, stuff like that.

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Now, his statement would be correct if he just dropped the social, if he just said justice. Because yeah, of course the gospel has something to do with justice.

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But when you add social justice to it, that's a rhetorical trick. And it's an annoying one.

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But yeah, so if you wanna find one person who says that, that's me, I will raise my hand. I say that.

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So that you are wrong. Matter of fact, many of the people who say that the gospel doesn't have implications or that social justice is a distraction from the gospel are also the people who are arguing just the opposite all the time when they're talking about whatever issues they're interested in.

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And often I agree with them on those issues. So abortion, no one's going to say, let's not talk about abortion or the gospel doesn't have implications for the systemic problem of abortion.

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Yeah, it's an actual systemic problem too. But that's a real easy one though,

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Dr. Moore, because here's the thing. We can go to the scripture and we can see where God says, you shall not kill.

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And then we can also go to the scripture and see what are the penalties for killing and the various kinds of killing, whether it's murder, whether it's manslaughter, whether it's accidents, whatever it is.

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And we can go to the scripture and say, here's what justice is in the case of murder. You find two or more witnesses, you convict the person, and then you execute that person for committing murder.

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If it's manslaughter, we have different rules. If it's accidental, we have different rules. And so we can go directly to the scripture and say, this is where we're getting this.

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This is why it's an issue of justice. This is why we should teach the nations to obey everything that Christ commands. This is part of Christ's commandment and very easy.

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That's an easy thing to do. You can't do the same thing though, when it comes to income inequalities.

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You can't show me in the scripture the law of God or anywhere for that matter, where it says everyone should be making the same.

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And if it isn't, it's an injustice. You cannot show me anything like that in the scripture. So it's completely different from what we're talking about when it comes to abortion, for example, and what you're talking about when it comes to income and wealth inequalities.

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So maybe that clears things up for you. I think you already know this, but whatever.

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Some of them will talk about gambling and the systemic issues that come along with gambling and rightly so.

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So it's not that they're... I think he's talking about Dr.

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MacArthur, I'm pretty sure. And as far as John MacArthur and I, I mean, we might disagree on the sinfulness of gambling or the systemic issue of gambling, but the reality is that gambling was not illegal.

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It's not a legal issue in the law of God. And so if someone were to say gambling should be illegal,

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I would say that's an unjust law. That's an unjust law according to the scripture because you can't show me the law where it says that that should be illegal.

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Is it even sinful to gamble? I think it can be probably, but it's not automatically sinful.

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Again, you'd have to show me in the scripture. And that's what this debate is all about. It's about what does the Bible say? You know,

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I was talking to some Native Speaks brothers and they said to me that anything that we have the power to control or regulate that's a sin, we should do that.

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And I said, no, absolutely not. We shouldn't do that because that would be an unjustified use of the civil government.

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That would be an unjust situation. It would be unjust for the government to ban gambling. Okay, that would be against the law of God or whatever.

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And so this is an argument about what the Bible teaches about the role of civil government and what justice is.

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That's what this debate is about. It's not about people who say there's no justice in the Bible, the gospel doesn't apply justice, nothing like that.

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It's about what does the Bible say? And I would believe everything you said, Dr. Moore, if you could just show me in the scripture where it says the government should be involved in X, whatever the issue is.

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The government needs to be involved in abortion because that's murder. Doesn't need to be involved in wealth or income inequality because the scripture does not give it purview over voluntary economic transactions.

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There's really a controversy about whether or not the gospel has implications for social justice.

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It's usually that what social justice means in that context has to do with black and brown people.

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And that's really where the issues ultimately land is on questions of race.

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And I've seen that close up. I've had people say, well, we want to work together on something having to do with dignity of human life, sanctity of human life.

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And we want to talk about abortion. We want to talk about euthanasia. We want to talk about adoption and orphan care, but we don't want to talk anything to do with race.

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And my answer would come back and say, well, why not? Well, we think it's a distraction. And I'll say, well, do you think euthanasia is a distraction?

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Do you think that questions of disability are a distraction that you don't have a problem? Okay, so this is what

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I was expecting after seeing the comments about this little podcast here. And the reality is that if somebody is saying, issues of partiality based on skin color or ethnicity are not gospel issues, then

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I would disagree with that. Of course it is. The scripture always talks about partiality, showing partiality based on economic status, ethnicity, all of these things.

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Old Testament talks about partiality. New Testament talks about partiality. No question about that.

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So if someone is saying that, I highly doubt that they're saying that. But if they are saying that,

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I stand against them with you, Dr. Moore. What I think is happening though, is issues that have to do with race, but also have to do with justice in general.

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And those are a distraction. So in other words, let's talk about Michael Brown shooting, right?

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Because the Michael Brown shooting was a police shooting. Some people said it was unjustified.

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Some people said it was justified. And the issue is that, that's the issue. Was it an unjustified killing or was it a justified killing?

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That's the only question. Anything having to do with race is a distraction.

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And here's what I mean by that. Because what justice is in the case of Michael Brown, it doesn't change whether the officer was white, whether the victim was white, or whether the officer was black, or whether the victim was black, or any other color of the rainbow.

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It actually makes no difference. You will never find in the law of God where it says, if you murder someone, you can get the death penalty.

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But if you murder someone of a different race, then it's a different penalty. You don't hear anything about that.

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So the speculation as to whether or not this is a racial issue, it's worthless speculation.

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You see what I'm saying? It's worthless. Because it absolutely makes no difference if the shooting was justified, if the victim was black or white, or Asian, or Puerto Rican, or Korean, or whatever.

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It makes no difference at all. So the only question that we should be debating in terms of justice is, was that a justified shooting or not?

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People have different opinions on that. And the fact of the matter is that a court of law said that it was a justified shooting.

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And so that's it. Now, that might be a miscarriage of justice, and we can talk about that. But again, the race issue in that situation is a distraction.

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It just simply is. There is no extra penalty. There is no lesser penalty if it somehow is a matter of a racial bias.

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If that cop killed that guy because he was black, he should still be executed. Or if he killed him just because he was scared of him or didn't like him, or just because he wanted to kill someone today and just happened to be that guy, it doesn't matter.

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The penalty is the same. That kind of a race issue is a distraction. It's just that simple.

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Well, no, and eventually what comes out is, yeah, but we have donors, we have people around us that would get upset if we started talking about race.

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Okay, well, that's not a question of whether or not you think the gospel has anything to do with justice.

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So let me get this straight. Russell Moore here is basically making the argument that people on the opposite side of this issue, the only reason that they're on the opposite side of this issue is because essentially they're racist.

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If it has to do with black and brown people, they don't wanna lose their donors, and so therefore they're not gonna talk about it even though they know the

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Bible addresses it. Show me in the scripture where there's a special justice, a special kind of way that you do things based on skin color of the participants.

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Show me in the scripture that, and I'll be with you on it. Until you can, let's handle this the way the scriptures say we should handle it.

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This is a really dishonest way to frame the argument. Honestly, this is a new low.

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Dr. Moore, this is a new low. That's something else. The other problem is because the words social justice have become easily politicized in the same way that, for instance, the words family values were politicized in the other direction.

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So there was a time when if someone were to say to, say, a progressive, are you for family values?

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The response would be no. And even though, if you step back and say, now wait a minute, you're really not for what you consider to be parents taking care of their children.

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No, because what I hear when I hear family values, that progressive would say, is the other tribe.

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And so I don't even wanna talk about those things using that language. Well, the same thing has often happened with language of social justice.

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Yeah, but this is a very common tactic as well, where they say, well,

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I'm pro -life, but I'm not pro -life because pro -life means anti -abortion.

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No, we have to use terms and words as they're used in our culture. I mean, that's like saying you have a problem with the label

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Calvinist or something like that. Let's use these words the way they're used in culture. Social justice is used in culture to mean a very specific set of beliefs.

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Income inequalities, wealth inequalities, racial disparities, things like that. That's what social justice means today.

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Now, the word social and justice don't have to mean that, but this is how the word is used.

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And so this is just an annoying little semantics game. I'm willing to call it whatever you wanna call it. You wanna call it social justice, okay, as long as it's under the, as long as we understand each other.

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Do you see what I'm saying? I just don't understand this like zealous, like we need to use social justice.

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We have to use that term. No, we don't because it's very confusing. I'm willing to give it up. We can call real justice something else.

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We can call it biblical justice. We can call it law of God justice. I don't care what you call it, but let's just be understood because if somebody hears someone say that social justice is a gospel issue, all of a sudden they're thinking, oh, income inequality is a gospel issue.

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Racial disparities is a gospel issue, and none of them are. None of them are. And so I don't understand why you're trying to sow confusion.

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I'm trying to sow more understanding here. Do you all have people?

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This is gonna take, this is 30 minutes. We're only a 10th of the way through. We've gone 15 minutes already. I don't know about this.

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Well, when I hear social justice, I think about people who are trying to do all kinds of other things that I don't agree with.

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So that language therefore is theirs, no? Right, and not only is it all kinds of people that are trying to do things

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I don't agree with, but actually you guys use it in the same way to talk about income inequalities and talk about racial disparities and talk about oppressor and victim and all of these classes that come from the culture.

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You didn't get this from the Bible. The Bible doesn't address these things. So it's not just that other people are using it in a wrong way.

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You're using it in a wrong way, and that's the problem. It's not about the word. It's about the ideas, and you have the same ideas as the culture, except you sprinkle a little

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Jesus on top and think it's biblical. It's not. It's not. That language isn't theirs because in so many other ways, there's all sorts of language that we cannot abandon and we cannot give up.

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We need to reclaim. We, yeah, but we can't reclaim it by using the same ideologies and the same meanings that they are.

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The only difference being you sprinkle a little Jesus on top because the reality is, I've heard this from people

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I respect too. We got to reclaim these words. And in a sense, I agree. Yeah, we should reclaim these words, but right now we can't because there's too many people that are using the words but also meaning the same exact things that the world means.

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It's the same. It's not about the word. It's about the ideology. It's about the ideas, and you have the same ideas.

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I played a great clip of Russell Moore on CNN where he has the same. There was no clash of worldviews because he has the worldview of CNN, except he sprinkles a little

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Jesus on top. It's annoying and it's frustrating because you make it seem like,

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I don't believe any of the same stuff they do. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. We could show you a million examples of this.

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Justice, particularly. The social is just a modifier telling you that you're talking about not just what we do individually in personal morality, but what we do together as -

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Yeah, and television means far vision. But does that mean that that's how we use the word today? As a society, justice is a biblical word that is repeated and defined over and over and over and over again.

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Yes, it is. It's defined specifically. And guess what has nothing to do with it?

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Skin color has nothing to do with it. Justice does not change based on skin color. And it's very clearly defined so that racial disparities and income inequalities and wealth disparities have nothing to do with it either.

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So when we talk about these issues of how does the gospel interact with justice,

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I think the real issue here is a controversy that went on really heatedly in the 1980s, but preceded that by many, many years and continues to be with us.

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And that's the controversy over lordship salvation. And I was talking about this the other day in a lecture that I gave at Southeastern Seminary.

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When I was a youth minister, one of the really illuminating moments that I had -

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We're gonna stop this at five. Teaching Wednesday night Bible study, stood up and was presenting the gospel. This young woman came up to talk to me.

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We'll call her Jennifer for right now. Jennifer came up to me afterward and said, I wanna be baptized.

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I bet her real name is Jennifer. Well, tell me why you wanna be baptized. Because she said it just kind of nonchalantly.

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And so I thought there must be something going on here. I said, why do you want to be baptized? And she said, well,

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I was christened when I was a baby in a Catholic church. And then I was rechristened again in some other kind of church a couple years later.

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And then I was baptized as a four year old in a Pentecostal church.

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And then when I was 10 years old, I was baptized in a Mormon church in a Christian, Jehovah's Witness church, whatever, all of these different places.

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And she said, you know, the way that I look at it, no one really knows which of these religions is right for sure.

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So I just wanna make sure that when I die, if there's a God, that I've got everything covered.

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So the way she was looking at it was, I wanna make sure I have my passport stamped by as many authorities as I can, so that whichever one

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God will receive will get me into heaven. And I said, well, that's not what baptism is, in my view.

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And so let me talk to you about the gospel. And so as I'm talking about repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ, about the crucifixion of Jesus for sinners, his resurrection from the dead, his lordship over us, she stopped me and said, no, let me tell you what

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I'm looking for. So she was almost in this situation where she was kind of bargaining with someone as though someone were trying to sell her something.

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She said, no, let me tell you the deal I'm looking for. The deal I'm looking for is I want to be able to get drunk occasionally because I'm young.

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I wanna be able to get drunk. I wanna smoke a little weed occasionally, not all the time, but every once in a while.

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She said, I wanna have sex with my boyfriend and I wanna go to heaven. That's the deal I'm looking for.

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And my response was to say, well, that's the deal that everybody is looking for in their fallen flesh.

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Let us sin all the more that grace be abound, as the apostle Paul says. But that's not what the gospel does.

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What the gospel does is to come in and say - How is he gonna tie this to what we're talking about here?

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This is interesting, I wanna see what he has to say. Means that you come under his lordship. You come under his lordship as a sinner.

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You come under his lordship as somebody who's repenting of sin, not one time, but repenting of sin continuously through this earthly life.

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But the gospel simply does not allow you to continue unchanged in sin in terms of your personal morality.

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What I said to her was, let's do this. I want you to read through the gospel of John and I'm gonna give you some materials as you're doing that.

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And then my wife Maria and I and you will meet together and we'll talk about it and we'll move forward.

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And I want you to pray and ask the Lord to show you himself as we're going through this process.

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Well, she came back a week later and said, oh, no need to do that because she said that she had run into a pastor of another church who was willing simply to baptize her on those terms.

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Well, that's not New Testament Christianity. What's the point? When we're dealing with these questions of justice, really what we're dealing with is a combination of those same instincts toward no lordship salvation along with the same instincts toward a kind of market -driven

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Christianity that says highlight the things that are attractive to whatever your audience is and minimize those things that are unattractive to your audience.

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Now. Yeah, so that's ridiculous. So no, that's not what it is at all. In fact, that's what

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I think you are doing because here's the thing, you've written articles against theocracy and against sort of the yucky stuff in the law of God.

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Lots of people do that. Lots of people wanna shun the yucky stuff. Like for example, where it says, if you do not work, you do not eat.

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Like that, for example. People won't wanna talk about that. Instead, they start talking with the overarching principles of loving your neighbor.

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And yes, we have to love our neighbor as ourselves, but the gospel, or I'm sorry, the scripture tells you specifically what that looks like.

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And part of that is, if you don't work, you don't eat. Do you see what I'm saying? And so I don't think that people from my side typically are doing that.

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We just recognize that racial disparities and income inequalities and wealth disparities and economic disparities and all of this stuff that comes from outside of the scripture, it's not biblical justice.

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It has nothing to do with it. And I think that many of you guys, I'm not gonna accuse you of doing this, Dr. Moore, because I don't know you.

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A lot of people on that side, I think are doing it because the world likes that stuff. If you've noticed,

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Dr. Moore, the world is all about the same stuff that you're all about, except they don't sprinkle the

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Jesus on top. Do you understand? But what they're definitely not all about is saying if you don't work, you don't eat.

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And that's biblical. Do you see what I'm saying? So anyway, that was a long story. I hope you didn't just stop watching during that.

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We will pick this up at minute nine next time. Thank you for watching. I hope this was helpful.