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I was talking to my wife about this book, the first chapter that I mentioned in the video last night. And you know, that whole thing with the saying that hip hop culture has influenced race relations more positively than the church has in 2000 years, it's so, you know, it's so preposterous.
But just to dissect it a little bit more, it really kind of shows that this is kind of a cultural divide more than anything. Because if you think about it, I mean, what's happening with hip hop culture and why it's had a positive, let's just say, let's just accept it.
It's had a positive influence on race relations. What's happening there? Well, what's happening there is that people are liking the same stuff. They're liking the same music, the same food, the same way of talking, the same way of dressing.
It's a cultural thing. They're agreeing to a same culture. And you know, this is not, you know, like a model of race relations in my opinion. What's happening here is that a lot of times, white people get made fun of for this.
They get called wiggers and things like that because they start, you know, acting like urban people even when they're not urban. And that's not like it's just accepted. I mean, have you ever seen 8 Mile?
It's not just accepted a lot of the time, but there's an assimilation going on. There's an assimilation for middle class, you know, people, you know, acting and dressing like urban people. There's nothing wrong with this, by the way.
Assimilation is totally fine. If that's what you wanna do, that's what you wanna do. And people assimilate to various degrees all the time. I mean, when I'm with, you know, business people, I speak and act differently than I do when I'm with my family or when I'm at a family reunion or when I'm at my church.
I kind of take on different, not characteristics. I mean, I'm still the same person, but I speak differently. I use different language. There's different kinds of words that I use that, you know, in one context, it wouldn't make sense.
People wouldn't understand them. But in another context, they make perfect sense. And this happens all the time. There's nothing wrong with that. So, you know, to say that the church culture isn't appealing to different races and things like that, I think that's confusing because every race under the sun has a Christianity and has churches and things like that.
You've got Asian churches, you've got German churches, you've got African-American churches, you've got African-African churches, things like that. And so, you know, to compare it to the hip-hop culture, I saw another example of this once.
It was a video by Francis Chan, and he was lamenting how the church isn't good enough. We don't provide a family for people. And he was talking about how these gang members started coming to his church, and then they stopped going because they felt like they had a family with the gang, but they didn't have a family with the church.
And he's talking about how this is to our shame. And, you know, I guess that's possible that your church is really that cold. I don't think that it's very likely. I think what's actually going on in there is that the gang members preferred to hang out with people to talk about drug deals and to talk about murders and to talk about, you know, money, cash, hoes, rather than gathering with people to sing praises to the Lord.
I mean, this is a conversion issue. They'd rather be with their gang and other criminals than be with the church. That's what they'd prefer. And so, you know, hey, if your church is a cold place, and yeah, you should reconsider that, obviously.
But just because gang members don't wanna hang out with you doesn't mean that your church is wrong. You know what I mean? It seems to me very preposterous. And again, it's this whole idea of like, your churches aren't ethnically diverse, therefore there's something wrong with them.
Well, there could be. I mean, you could have a racist church, but I just don't ever see too much evidence for that. I just see that people are saying, well, there's not a lot of black people in this church, therefore it must be racist.
That's just not the case at all. Could it be? I suppose. But you need to have evidence for that. You know, you can't just look at the, it's like the feminists, what they do with the STEM careers. They say, well, you know, if there are not enough women in STEM, that must mean that it's a sexist thing.
No, it isn't. All it could mean is that they just don't wanna go into the STEM fields, you know? You gotta have evidence for these claims. And so like, I have a feeling, I haven't read it, obviously, but I have a feeling that there's gonna be a lot of claims in this book that are just completely unsupported by the evidence.
In the first chapter, he talks about how the first thing you need to do is accept the truth. That's true. You do need to accept the truth, but you also need to establish the truth to see if it's actually really true.
Because lots of people believe lots of things that aren't true necessarily. So we'll see how this goes. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to just address this tweet here. This is Dwight McKissick. He's an Arminian pastor, and I think he's in the Southern Baptist Convention.
My goodness. And he took issue with me. So here, I tweeted that being Puerto Rican is great because it makes me immune to the normal charges of the left. Liberals, typically what they'll do is they'll call you racist.
They'll call you white supremacist. They'll call you whatever. But I'm immune to it because they'll still call me that. I mean, they don't have any problem calling me that, but I have slave ancestors.
I have indigenous people's ancestors. So when they call me white supremacist or whatever, I just laugh about it. It's just stupid. It reveals how stupid you are when you call me those things. But anyway, so Dwight McKissick took issue with something that I had said previously, and he responded to this tweet.
And he said, what were the unexpected blessings of slavery that I mentioned in an earlier tweet? Please name a few of them. And here's the thing. McKissick is an Arminian, so I don't expect him to understand what I mean by that because for an Arminian, it's very hard to see how God could intend something good, using an evil, even though the Bible is replete with examples of that.
The Bible is constantly using examples of evil things that people do, but God actually intends them for good. God actually ordains them sovereignly in his decree. He decrees that it will happen. He renders it certain that these things will happen, but he does it without sin, and he does it for a good cause.
Obviously, the example of Joseph being sold into slavery, the Bible says Joseph's brothers meant it for evil, but God meant it for good to save many people. And that was my answer here. I mean, it was very, very clear.
I said, you know, the Lord saved... Here's my tweet. The Lord saved many of my family members and myself and thousands, if not millions of others through a series of events that included the slave trade.
So God, in his infinite wisdom, in his holiness, in his sovereign decree, decided that the slave trade would happen. He rendered it certain that it would happen. He did it without sin, and he did it for a good cause.
He saved many people through the slave trade. That's just how it happened. Now, you know, is there a chance that I would have been a Christian even if that slave trade didn't happen? Of course, obviously.
God can do whatever he wants. God can save people through various types of means. He can save people through just a normal missionary. He can save people through Christopher Columbus if he wants to. He can save people through the slave trade if he wants to.
He could save people through a dream if he wanted to. He can do all of those things, but when we look back, when we look at history, we see how he did do it. So in other words, history is just a, I preached on this on Sunday.
You look at Israel's history, example after example, everything that happens to them is a demonstration of God's covenant love for his people. There's a great Psalm, Psalm 136, that says God created the world because of his covenant love, his steadfast love.
God saved his people because of his covenant love. He destroyed Egyptians. He drowned Egyptians. He destroyed the firstborn of the Egyptians because of his covenant love for his people. The Bible really is just example after example of God's covenant love for his people, and really all of history is that as well.
Everything that happens in history is for the good of those who love God. It's an example of his covenant love, and therefore the slave trade is an example of God's covenant love for his people. He shows people covenant love through various means.
Now, here's what Dwight McKissick has to say about that. Now, remember, he's an Arminian. He doesn't have categories for this. His theology is completely inadequate for this kind of a presentation. He cannot understand the slave trade in that way as an Arminian because in Arminianism, there is no sovereign decree of God.
It's not that God has a certain history that he's unfolding and a certain decree and a certain sovereignty that he's unfolding over time. No, people are just independent actors free from God's sovereignty, can do whatever they want.
When people do evil things, it's just that's the only meaning that that evil has. God might be able to scramble and make something out of that, but God didn't intend it for that. So here's what he says.
He says, I don't know your family slavery history. As for African-Americans, W .E. Boyd, his PhD Harvard, in his book called The Negro, declared the cross preceded the crescent. Even in the remote parts of Africa, Christianity had come to Africa technically before it reached Europe.
Therefore, Africans did not come to America to hear about Jesus or to get saved. Even today, Christianity is exponentially exploding in Africa while declining in America. Name a blessing slavery produced.
I'm still waiting. So he's grandstanding a little bit and Dwight often grandstands. I mean, he doesn't really respond to tweets. He retweets and grandstands for his people, but that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
I do the same thing from time to time. But anyway, notice the change though. Notice the change here. He says, Africans did not come to America to hear about Jesus or to get saved. And here he says that Christianity came to Africa before it reached Europe.
The change is that he's saying almost, and he actually, one of his followers actually says this to me directly. He says, well, God didn't need slavery in order to bring Africans to Christianity. He already had brought Christianity to Africa.
And that's true, obviously. Augustine was from Africa. Remember the map that I showed of how Christianity spread? It spread in the Middle East and Africa first, and then it went to Europe. He's absolutely right about all of that.
But notice, I never said that Christ needed slavery. The only thing that he was doing in the slave trade was spreading Christianity to Africans because he had no other way to do it. He just didn't know how to do it.
Like, that's not what I said at all. I'm not saying that he needed to do this via slavery. I'm just saying that he did do it via slavery. So if slavery didn't happen, there's a chance I would still be a Christian, my family would still be Christians.
There's no question about that. There's a chance of that. God could have done it any way he wanted to. But the reality is that he did it this way, and he brought many Africans to the United States according to his sovereign will in order to bless his people.
He did that. In order to bless his people. Do you, I mean, does that make sense? Everything that God, that happens in history, God does intending to bless his people. He's showing his covenant love for his people.
Even these calamities. Even these calamities. Like, let's not make any bones about it. Destroying the firstborn of Egypt is a calamity for Egypt. There's no question about it. But it's an example of his covenant love for his people.
Bringing in the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and to sack and to plunder the Israelites and to take them into slavery. That was a calamity for them. But it's an example of his covenant love for his people.
And I would say likewise, slavery, it's a calamity for Africa. That was an evil thing. The people, the slavers who were involved in it should be executed. They should have been executed for their crimes against the Lord.
But yet, it's still an example of his covenant love for his people. Now, a reformed person should understand this. Dwight McKissick or other Arminians, I don't expect them to understand this. Now, some Arminians do understand this.
They say, well, yeah, obviously God uses these evil things for good. And you can see how God did that in slavery. This was evil, pure evil. They might not agree that God sovereignly decreed it, but at least they can admit that God used it for good and saved many people.
But some Arminians don't even have that as an option. They just don't even have that as a category. And that's, I don't understand how you can even understand the Bible if you don't understand these things.
But anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. I hope this was helpful. God bless.