Apologia Radio: God, Governments, and Culture

Isaiah’s Vision of the Nations Streaming to the Lord’s House

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it.

And many people shall come and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

What's up, y 'all?

What up, Phil?

Hey, Apologia Radio, y 'all. This is 1360 KBOQ, Faith Talk, baby. And we're back, another week, Apologia Radio. Very special, actually, very, very special Apologia Radio, isn't it?

Yeah, this is gonna be an epic show.

It is, it is.

What's up, Jerry? What's up?

How you doing?

Jerry's looking it.

Doing good, man.

Yeah?

Doing really good. Messing with Sage over here. All right, so I'm Jeff, that's Luke, and that's Jerry over there. And we have an entire studio full right now with the whole crew. We've got Joel McDermott.

What's up, Joel?

I'm here, man.

Psy?

Present.

That's Psy, Tim, Brooke, and Kate. We're all sharing microphones right now, because it's completely full. That's Ivy Connerly.

How goes it?

Marcus Pittman.

Is this real life?

Yes.

Or is it a fantasy?

You said house, what's going on? We got a room full of guys who are underslept.

That's right.

The God, Governments, and Culture Conference and the Law of God Debate

Overtraveled, overworked, haven't had a shower, and we're all stuck together touching elbows.

Joel, I got a puritanical amount of sleep last night, so I'm pretty good.

I slept, woke up every hour to check the smoker, and slept on Jeff Durbin's couch.

And Sage is here, too. Sage, what's up?

Say hi.

Hello.

And so here we go. It's finally here, the moment we've all been waiting for, and the moment that homeschool woodpeckers will be talking about for decades to come.

For the rest of time.

History.

History in the making. That's right. So this is the week. We're doing God, Governments, and Culture Conference. This episode is going to air Saturday, but it'll be up on podcast worldwide by tonight. And I want to encourage you, if you haven't got tickets yet, and you can't make it, you can get them at ggcconference .org, or you can show up and get tickets.

You can join us. We're going to have all the speakers that I just introduced at the conference talking about all kinds of great stuff we're going to fill you in today about. And we're going to have the anticipated debate between Joel McDermott and J .D. Hall on the.

Law of God.

So very excited. Luke, are you excited, dude?

Very.

You ready to go, dude?

Yeah. Yeah?

I got sleep. I'm feeling good.

Yeah, man. And we, I mean, Marcus and Ivy and I were up last night till like two or more in the morning, probably 2 .30 actually is when we actually went to bed. We're talking, rapping about God, the gospel, culture, and the scriptures.

And we also had to fix. Joel's smoke went out. His fire went out.

Hey, we fixed it quick, man.

Yeah, we did.

But I did learn that we are not that good at starting fires.

No.

It's actually much tougher than you might think.

I'm really glad for a lighter fluid.

Yes.

I hope you're okay with that.

Mark.

Marcus saves his fire starting for Facebook.

That's right.

I was just thinking, though, imagine if we had to actually like saw together a fire from two pieces of wood last night just to keep those coals going.

Yeah.

It's awesome that the toils reverse to the point where we can just throw fuel on it.

All right.

So again, this is the big week, guys. And so we want to let's bring everyone into it. And so this whole entire conference, the debate came about because just really a few months ago, a friend who was actually a disciple of Bonson went to his church, sent me a video from a brother named J .D. Hall, who does a broadcast called Pulpit and Pen.

And he said, Jeff, you got to check this out. It's just it's just bad. It's you got it wrong and you really got to hear this. And so I listened to it and it was just a lot of wrong and needed to be addressed.

And I think in my own mind, we're up to the conference now. We can talk about this. I just I think that J .D. is a solid brother in Christ. And I think that he just was on the radio and this topic popped up in his mind or on the plate.

And he just started to talk about something that I think he knew at the time very, very little about. And so that's because of how much he misrepresented it. And so we responded, I think, very respectfully, very graciously to the things that he said.

And so J .D. got a hold of it and said, hey, I'm going to listen to it and I'll get back to you guys, basically. And so he responded. And so what happened was, is we decided we're going to make this discussion between us much bigger and and much more available to more people over the long run and something more meaningful.

And so we were able to organize this to where Joel could do a debate with J .D. Hall on the law of God. So, Joel, I want you to kind of fill in now what, from your perspective, where are you at and how do you feel about the debate, the conference?

Well, I think I'm going to start studying for the debate tonight, maybe read a book or two on the topic. But I know I'm right.

Yeah.

I know I'm right.

Yeah. No, no.

I mean, actually, I've had very cordial dialogue with J .D. Hall, and I'm really looking forward to this as an opportunity to, you know, we've had previous debates. I mean, they either took place in a very academic setting and they weren't very public and they were very early.

People still hadn't really worked through a lot of the material yet. Or the probably the most famous debate was between Gary North, Gary DeMar, Dave Hunt and Tommy Ise.

Yeah.

And that was a lot more along the lines of eschatology. So nobody's actually sat down. Let's narrow down on the on the focus of Mosaic judicial law and how they apply today and debate this as a topic.

And to his credit, that's all what J .D. wanted to do. He said, let's not get off the eschatology or anything, let's debate this issue. And I think that's what's exciting about it, because we can actually put that on the table and really get on into all the nuances.

And so my hope is that's what the debate actually happens. He really tries to challenge me from scripture on that topic and not turn it into the what his podcasts were, which is see how many boogeyman quotes we can pull out of theonomic writers or at least try to present them that way.

So there's a lot of potential here, I think, not necessarily for the debate, but as far as having a discussion that will endure beyond this event that people can go to and say, oh, OK, now I see what they're talking about.

Yeah. OK.

Why bother, though, Joel? Why bother? What's what's what's the big thing about talking about the law of God? Don't we have bigger things to do? Or is this a meaningful discussion to have between brothers?

Go into all the world, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son of the Holy Spirit. And that's where it stops.

Yeah. Right.

Right. That's it.

No, there's no more teaching them all things. I've commanded you.

Yeah.

Well, that's the whole of scripture. And he's not just talking about saving souls to go to heaven. He's talking about Christian civilization, Christian society, the kingdom of God and all that it represents.

Yeah.

And so, yes, of course, it's important you leave that out and you end up with what we have today. I mean, you've got liberal churches, homosexual marriage is being embraced by people calling themselves Christians.

And it goes on and on and on. Well, if you teach biblical law at the levels of family, church and state, you can avoid a lot of these problems. At least have a tradition in place where you can point to and say, no, this is what we should be doing.

And when we evade that responsibility, you get what we have today.

Yeah, that's right.

All right, y 'all.

So let's bring you guys in now, Cy. You came all the way from Canada, eh?

Yeah, brother.

Yeah, it was minus 18 Fahrenheit when I left.

Are you excited to be here?

Oh, it's great. You know, I love my Nissan. I have a Nissan. But, you know, I look at my car, it says minus 27 degrees Celsius. And beside it, it says a little thing that says icy. I don't need my car to tell me it's icy when it's minus 27.

I know.

But, you know, I was thinking, looking around the room.

So you actually had to put on long pants.

Yeah.

Looking around the room, I don't know how many people have actually met J .D. Hall, but I spoke at his Reformation Montana last year. I met him. And he's a wonderful brother. And I believe we're going to be doing some fellowshipping with him, too.

So that's fantastic. Now, it's interesting, I think, since he found out I was a theonomist, that I wasn't invited back to Reformation Montana this year. But like I say, he's a great brother, and it'll be nice to hook up with him again.

Looking forward to this. I'm really looking forward to this debate, you know, so that I could learn more about this position as well, because I've never heard a good argument against it. You know, I don't really understand the position that well.

But when people speak against it, I'm thinking, well, that's not what they're saying. So I'm looking forward. I'm praying for both sides, praying for Joel and for J .D., that they represent, that they honor Christ in this debate, and that it's a teaching moment, that people can see the positions and that, you know, by the grace of God, come away understanding the true position, the right one.

Yeah.

Joel and I were talking last night for a long time. And Joel, you and I are talking about the course, generally, people take in their thinking process to get to a view of understanding that God's the absolute standard.

He's the ultimate authority. When he speaks, he's the source of knowledge, certainty, truth. And so when he's spoken on areas of justice, from a presuppositional standpoint, a mindset that God's the standard and we have certainty because he's spoken, that leads you inevitably to a view that, well, God's law is the standard, because God's the reference point, not man.

So talk about that.

I think a lot of people, of course, a lot of people get into the theonomy movement from different angles.

Yeah.

Some of them come into it studying American history. Some of them come into it through changing their eschatology and you become post mill. And the next thing you want post mill with legs on it.

Yes. Right.

Or some people come through reading, studying presuppositional apologetics, and they go through that that middle process of saying, well, if God's sovereign here and there's no neutrality, well, then what about in this area of life?

What about that area of life? Next thing you're a theonomist. And some people come straight through reformed theology, God, just like you just discussed.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people in that world, if you leave them alone and you don't introduce this particular topic to them, they will sound like theonomists 80 percent of the time.

Right.

And I can show you that in many of the guys who are devoutly our opponents, when they go confront abortion, it's God's law. God's going to judge this nation if we don't get rid of this abomination.

Hardcore pipe hitting theonomists.

I mean, it's like nothing exists except the book of Leviticus when you're attacking abortion.

Yes.

But then you say, OK, well, how does that apply to the monetary system? How does that apply to the court system? Oh, no, we don't get involved. We're just here to save souls.

Yes.

And there's this disconnect between the two. And I think a lot of the younger generation are beginning to make the connection and they don't have any hang up. I think they're not stuck in the traditions that a lot of people are stuck in.

And they're certainly not stuck in the dispensational paradigm that a lot of their parents and previous generation are. And so they're more willing to make those connections. That's why you're seeing a lot of young people get in our movement.

And that's why you're seeing a lot of their pastors and their favorite leaders start criticizing it more because they're trying to stop that. They're trying to plug the holes in the dike, so to speak.

Very good.

That's that's some of it. I don't want to put it all on that, but that's certainly happening.

All right.

I'll stay with us, guys. God, governments and culture conference. Apology Radio dot com. All right. So I want to talk about what we just talked about. Marcus was saying that Beardbomb is awesome and I happen to agree.

And Joel, you were dissing on it.

Why?

I'll say it again, man.

If that's what I asked you, that's what it takes.

I asked you why. And you said it's manliness. It's manly.

No, no.

Because Marcus said it's manliness.

It's like putting manliness on your face.

That's right. And I said, if my manliness has to come out of a product that I buy off a shelf, I don't want to be a man.

All right.

And then I said, there's another name for that stuff. It's called makeup.

The problem is someone like me, though, I get like a face fro.

Yeah.

I get like face fro.

You got to do what you got to do.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes, you know, if my wife said, you know, take care of the face fro or I'm not going to kiss you anymore. I'd buy the product.

Yeah. Okay.

But you got to fight your battles. Pick your battles.

Speaking of which, didn't your wife say she wanted you to shave, Jeff? What are you still doing with that thing?

See, the thing is, though, Cy, the thing is, is I'm filming a movie right now. And I already have the beard and half of it, so it would be jolting to the audience if I take it off. But the thing is, though, my wife told me last time, she said, take the beard off.

So I took it off. And as soon as I took it off, she goes, yeah, get it back.

Get it back.

So.

So your excuse to your wife is continuity.

Yeah. Yeah.

And really, this movie is going to drag on for probably 20 years. Sorry, honey. The movie.

The movie.

The movie is not done yet.

Don't want to jar the audience.

Let's do this.

And I want everyone to start jumping in here. Cy, I think this is a good place to start. You are, you've made a reputation for yourself as being the guy that points to God as the reference point as to Christ as the foundation of all knowledge.

And so that's what people understand your message to be, is that Christ is Lord. We start with him. We can't know anything apart from God. And and fill that in, because that's what obviously you're going to talk about a bit.

But I want you to fill that in for maybe new listeners. When we talk as Christians about a Christian epistemology, how do we know what we know? Start the conversation, because that leads us into, I think, a discussion of God as a standard for the law of God, for the law.

DebatingDelahunty .com.

There you go.

Debating Delahunty.

Is that a movie that's coming out?

Yeah, I think so, Marcus.

Where can you get that movie at?

DebatingDelahunty .com.

Oh, OK. Is it available now?

I believe it's available now.

It's available now. How much is it, Cy?

I believe it's $9 .99.

That's pretty awesome.

You see, I said something in the earlier segment, and Marcus gave him the evil eye. Well, he said more than that.

He said...

No, no, I complimented you.

Oh, that's right.

What he said was, I'm very proud of you that you went an entire segment and didn't plug your film, Debating Delahunty, at DebatingDelahunty .com.

And you made me say it in such an important section, too, where we're talking about the authority. That's what I'm speaking of, the authority of the Great Commission.

Please, Cy, tell us about the authority and centrality of Jesus Christ. DebatingDelahunty .com.

Well, you see, DebatingDelahunty .com and Colossians1 .com.

Yeah, well, I do apologize for that, but it's the authority of the Great Commission. It's, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, as we just repeated earlier. And a lot of people start the Great Commission there, but that's not where it starts.

When you see a go therefore in Scripture, you have to think, go what for? And Jesus Christ said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me. Go therefore. And that is where the wheels fall off in the apologetic, is that it's a man-centered apologetic.

God is Lord of our theology, and man is Lord of our apologetics. And in this conference, I want to show people that if you don't start with God, Jesus Christ is Lord and the authority of our apologetic, the wheels fall off.

It's useless. And that's, you know, the heart of what we do as apologists, Jeff. And I'm really looking forward to sharing this with the audience there. Hopefully, there'll be some fresh people. It's kind of tough on me because I know you're a presuppositionalist, so, you know, and you do a lot of this a lot better than I do.

So I'm just hoping that I could share some new stuff with them.

We have, you and I, I don't know if you thought about this, we have three conferences together in the next three or four months.

Oh, that's right, yeah.

So we got this one, we've got Florida with Dr. White and Tony, a couple other guys, and then we got Matt Slick, you, and me, and Joe Boot. And I'll be in Canada.

That's right.

Joe Boot's a good friend of mine, too.

Should I be afraid? Should I be afraid of the weather?

No, but you know what they do is for the bears. Up there, the tourists are given little bells to wear to scare the bears off. And I don't know if you know the difference between grizzly bear feces and brown bear feces.

No, please tell me about the difference in bear feces.

Grizzly bear feces has little bells in it.

That's nice.

There you go.

Which bear is best?

The bear.

Oh, I got to finally meet the bear the first time, so that was great. He's a big guy. You said that I was big when you met me. He's a big guy.

Now you know why I call him the bear. That was my nickname for him when I first saw him.

That's cute.

What is his nickname for you?

The Ninja.

No, it's not. No, it's not.

Tell us.

I don't know. I don't really have one.

People call me the Ninja, that's where it came from. But he's named my son, my son Turtle. We call him Turtle because when he first met Stellar, when he was two weeks old, he was like, he looks like a turtle.

I was like, he does look like a turtle. Because of the way he poked his little head up and looked around. He's basically named my son, so that's why. So anyway, hello. I'm going to go a little further, Cy, into that discussion.

You talk as foundational when you preach to people and you teach people how to do a biblical apologetic, you talk about God as the foundation of knowledge and that we can't know anything apart from God.

So dig into that a little more.

I get a lot of grief from that because, say, Cy, you've made this apologetic too easy. You've reduced it to epistemology. And I don't like using the big words because I didn't know what these things meant before.

But that's the theory of knowledge. But why did I reduce it to that? Because all arguments depend on knowledge. And it's the easiest to prove in Scripture. Now, all things are foundational in God. But when the Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Jesus Christ.

It's the easiest place to reference in Scripture so you can say to the person, if you don't start with God, it logically follows that you know nothing. And I don't go to a campus and start with trivia.

And I'm not dissing the people that do that. But we have a powerful message. I tell them, look, I'm a Christian. And if they say, well, you're crazy for being a Christian, I say, well, really? Well, you know what the Bible says?

If you don't start with God, you can't know anything. And then I expose that to them. And very quickly, they give up knowledge. And I say, that's why you need to repent and put your trust in Jesus Christ because that's the option.

Jesus Christ or absurdity.

Okay, so let's attach to that, Joel. Here's my contention on the back side of that. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge...

We didn't rehearse this before.

No, we didn't. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ, right? Christ has all authority in heaven and on earth. And so the question that I ask is, if I want to know what justice is in society, I have to go to the source of all wisdom and knowledge, which is Christ, who actually has all authority in heaven and on earth.

And the Bible says that the civil magistrate, the civil authorities, they are the deacon.

Absolutely.

Of God.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, so they're in God's hand. They're to obey God. So my question is, if Christ is the foundation of all knowledge, what would he say to the civil magistrate today? And that's where I go in the issue of theonomy.

Yeah, sure.

So theonomy is essentially a presuppositional argument. Historically, that's how it fell out. You had a young theologian and minister. What was that?

He was whispering that your beard is beautiful. They didn't hear that. Only you did.

I see.

He said one minute.

One minute.

That was God speaking to you just now.

Good job, Joel.

Great answer. So yeah, that's how it all fell out historically. Van Til had done all of his work, basically giving the foundations for presuppositional apologetics, which is what Si just explained and you just explained.

And Rush Juney was a young minister on an Indian reservation watching how government destroyed people's lives and began asking the question, well, what about justice? What is a biblical view of justice?

And he began to hash these. He read Van Til and it changed his life.

Hang on to that. All right, guys. ApologiaRadio .com, guys. More on this discussion with Joel and everybody else. Guys, stay with us. Very excited to have this show with you guys.

Be right back.

Rushdoony, Van Til, and the Biblical Foundations of Justice

Apologia Radio. All right, Joel.

Hang on a second. Why do you keep reading from that Theonomy book?

That's good.

Well played.

Is that the Theonomy version you have there?

Yeah.

All right.

So, Joel, you and I were rapping about a young man who was on an Indian reservation that saw the government destroy a people.

Yeah.

Saw leftists and socialist policies destroy people's lives. And, of course, that actually goes back to the 1870s, but that's a different story. And he was asking questions, you know. How does the gospel take care of this?

How does the Bible apply to this? And when he read Van Til, it rocked his world. And the first book, I believe, that Rush Dooney wrote was By What Standard?

Yeah.

And that was really just a systematization, a condensed version of Van Til's thought in several essays. And then that was 1958. And he continued thinking and writing. One of the next books that he wrote in 1963, he wrote The Messianic Character of American Education.

Epic.

Epic book.

Yeah.

I mean, thick, dense.

Yes.

It's hard to get through. I mean, as far as you're not going to sit and read it through overnight. Packed with footnotes. Basically shows you what is the theology of the education system. And you say, theology of the education system?

I didn't know it had a theology. Why is there a theology of business, a theology of this, a theology of that? That's not gospel. But, yeah, it does. And he shows you how the worldview that's not Christian develops in this area.

And when you get done reading it like that, you're like, wow. These unbelievers, they're not only coming at it from a systematized worldview, dismantling Christianity and society through this system. It is systematic.

And they know what they're doing. And then you ask, what have the Christians been doing the whole time? There was a time when they were systematic about education also. What happened in our society that we lost that?

And so he's giving you, he's helping you see what happened in our society in a profound way. And then, okay, what is the answer for this? Well, he continues within that stream of thought. And in 1968, he begins a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments.

And as he preaches through each commandment, he goes and brings in all the case laws that attach to that commandment. And that is the beginning of five years of sermons that became the Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973.

And phenomenal book. I mean, as far as being the guy who blazed the trail with very little help at all, it's just unparalleled almost in Christian history. And I don't say that to pat our movement on the back.

I'm saying this is an epic book, and the guy did it almost single-handedly. You know, isolated out in California by himself doing these things. So, and then that's the beginning of the movement. So that's the link between what Si and you were talking about as far as the apologetic and the epistemology of it.

I think it's important to point something out too, Joel. When you talk about this beginning of the movement, we're talking about almost the Reformation in this area. We're talking about the resurgence of old Christian thought, Puritan thought.

Yeah, and there would be a lot of people that would just have a knee-jerk reaction to you calling this a Reformation. And in so many ways, it's nothing but getting back to the Puritan Reformation, what a lot of people call the Second Reformation.

Old school, crusty, plain, vanilla. Christianity.

It really is. And I mean, that's why I was talking with you in the car on the way over here about this new book we just put out from Alice Baldwin, published in 1928, a secular academic woman who did the history of the Puritan sermons that led up to all of the doctrines we hold dear in our political system.

The resistance of tyranny, all of that stuff came out of the New England pulpit, systematically over about six or seven centuries. So that when the events came up that would have led to the American Revolution, the tyranny that George and Parliament were imposing on the colonies, it was the pulpit that inspired the people to say, Oh, no, you don't.

These are our rights. This is biblical stuff. This is what we're here for. This is how we run society, and you're destroying it. And they fought a revolution for it. So everything we brag about today of all the great freedoms in America, badly eroded as they are, go back to the New England pulpit, which was down the line theonomic.

I mean, obviously there's some minor differences, but they were theonomic in a way that's completely lost in our pulpits today. So this is a restoration of what we used to have.

Yes. Wow.

Powerful. All right, guys. We've got a lot more show to do. We're going to talk about a lot more things, guys. You're going to hear from the speakers what they're going to talk about. You're going to hear from Ivy.

Maybe he'll rap for us. I don't know. Stay with us.

Right back.

Jesus and the Law of God in Matthew 5

Do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.