Andrew Tate and The Culture War | Collision w/ Jeff Durbin

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What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Collision. I'm Pastor Jeff Durbin. Today we're talking about Candace Owens and Andrew Tate, Christian culture versus Islamic culture.

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Here we go. All right.

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So here we go. Everyone knows today about Andrew Tate and of course, what he's going through right now with an arrest and all of that.

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It's widely known, publicly known, and recently Candace Owens did an interview with Andrew Tate, and there's a particularly interesting part of this interview that I wanted to address, because I think it really does address some fundamentally important areas that have been lost by Christians.

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Christians historically understood the authority of Jesus Christ, the authority of God's word.

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They understood that when they do missions, they're bringing tribes, tongues, peoples, languages, nations to God, that their hearts are changed, their minds are changed, they love

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God, and that change of heart and that regenerate person now lives in a new way, and that light comes out of them, and it comes out of the church, and it transforms the world.

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There's justice and righteousness and peace, and yeah, it shapes culture, but a lot of that's been lost in the

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West today, and there's some ways where I would want to challenge Andrew Tate on this conversation, but some ways where I genuinely understand what he's talking about, and so let's get into it.

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This is Candace Owens and Andrew Tate, the interview. Because you are right, we are in a culture war, and it's culture which is absolutely not really defining the direction in which we move, and this is one of the reasons why

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I reverted to Islam, because I feel like the Islamic culture is the strongest. So, very important.

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So, a culture war, there's elements to that that I would say, yes and amen, that's right on the money, a culture war.

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Yes, but we have to ask the question, well like, what is culture? And it's been said, and I think it's probably the best way to put it, that culture is religion externalized.

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So, just think about that quote for a moment, because it actually is a great way to express what's going on in the culture around about you.

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Culture is religion externalized. Culture represents the religion or the worship of the people, but the okay, granted, it's a cultural war, but what does that mean?

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Is that a meaningless claim? Is that just your opinion? Like, we just have to see whose looks the best, whose feels the best.

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He's going to say that in a moment here. It felt right for him. He feels the power of Islam, but he's chosen

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Islam as his foundation, as his reference point, the Quran, and of course the claims of Muhammad.

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That's where he's putting his finger, but that needs to be challenged. We should ask the question, who is worthy of following,

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Jesus or Muhammad? Who's a better ultimate, Jesus or Muhammad? And so, let's get into more.

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You feel the culture. I was wondering, because you were Christian, and you know, I definitely do not know enough about the

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Islamic faith to sit here and debate you on it. I'm never a person that will debate somebody on something that I'm not an expertise on, but I will say that I'm sad that you're not a

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Christian anymore, because I, and I can sense, perhaps it's because you felt that Christians weren't doing a good job defending their beliefs.

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Yeah, I think that God should be feared. So, this is important.

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Candace Owens speaks to the issue of Tate's fairly recent conversion to Islam, and she's sad that he's not a

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Christian. He's no longer a professing Christian. He's gone to Islam, and what's important to note, just from a biblical perspective, when you listen to Andrew Tate's description of the

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Christian faith, his understanding of the Christian faith, you really begin to understand that Andrew Tate never was a

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Christian. He never understood the Christian faith. There is a lot of nominalism in what used to be

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Christian nations. So, if you're in the UK, there's churches everywhere. I mean anywhere,

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Northern Ireland and Scotland, all over England, there's churches everywhere. Beautiful churches, actually, and you see the old remnants of this

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Christendom that once was. And so, a lot of that nominalism is still there, because there's this tradition and this culture, misunderstood culture of the

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Christian culture and framework, that's still sort of extant. It's still there. It exists there, but there's no real understanding of what it actually means to follow

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Jesus, and what it means to actually love Jesus, and to know Jesus. And so, again, listening to Andrew Tate on his understanding of what

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Christianity is, will demonstrate that he never really was a Christian. He didn't understand the claims of Christ, about who he is, his person, his identity, his mission, the gospel itself, the call to come and die and rise again with Christ, the call to repentance and faith, the free gift of eternal life.

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It seems, though, as though because Tate was sort of in the midst of this old remnant of Christendom, and there's this nominalism around him, he understands that nominalism to represent the

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Christian faith. And the answer is, it absolutely doesn't. And another point to make is, we can't, from a biblical perspective, say that Tate was actually a

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Christian before, truly a Christian, and then he's no longer a Christian, because scripture addresses that as well.

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Jesus says to people, depart from me, I never knew you. These were people who thought they were working for God.

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They thought they were honoring God, glorifying to God. And Jesus' response to them is, depart from me,

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I never knew you. Not, I knew you, and then I lost you. Or, I knew you, and you couldn't cut it,

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I never knew you. And then, of course, the apostle John in the first century addresses apostasy that's happening even in the first century, and his response to it is, they went out from us in order to demonstrate that they were never really of us.

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And so, there is the challenge of false professions of faith, i .e., the nominalism that is so repulsive to Tate.

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But what he is identifying is actually something important, and we need to, as Christians, really address this.

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He's addressing the fact that all of this seemed fake. All of this seemed to have no real meaning, no real foundation to it.

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There's no authority there. There's no fear of God there. And that's what he says, and he's right.

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When you talk about the Christian faith coming from, coming out of the

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Christian scriptures, that's all over. Fear God, the fear of God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the fear of God.

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We must fear God, and it's this reverential awe before God that we're supposed to have as his creatures.

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Tate's right about that. But what I would want to point to is that Andrew Tate has switched from a

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Christian foundation for authority in what is actually true, i .e., the Word of God in the

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Old and New Testaments, and he switched to Islam. But Islam, when it says we are to fear

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God, Islam is borrowing from the Christian scriptures. In other words, Islam is living off of borrowed capital.

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It's borrowed capital from the Old and New Testament scriptures, and it's derived from this broken, misinterpreted, even perverted version of the

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Christian scriptures, and it says fear God. And Tate, you know, kudos to him.

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He respects that we ought to fear God. And I'm going to say to that, yay and amen. That's all over the

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Bible, Old and New Testaments, but that in itself is really borrowed capital from the Christian worldview.

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And so you want to throw away the Christian worldview and say that it's not floating your boat, it's not giving you the foundation, but Islam is living on the borrowed capital of those

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Christian scriptures. I believe that God should be feared. I fear God.

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It's one of the only things I fear. And I believe that also you see

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God to a degree or you see religion how you see yourself. And I see myself as a person of strong principles and strong morals.

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And I like to think of myself as the kind of person nobody really wants to cross, not because I'm a psycho, but because I'm a man of capability and I'm smart and I'm strong, and nobody wants to make an enemy of me.

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So I feel like I find an affinity to a belief system which has very similar outlooks.

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And there's a whole bunch of other things I can say from the Quran and Islamic texts, et cetera, but to keep it very vague and very broad for people who are not

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Islamic, I felt God when I was in an Islamic country. So this is important when, and we've addressed this before with Andrew Tate.

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Andrew Tate has taken the approach to finding his identity and finding the truth by way of trying to find a mirror.

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And what that means is he's trying to look to the text where he sees himself in it.

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And he sees the highest version of himself in it, in terms of looking back at him.

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Okay, I identify with this religion because I can see it looking back at me in the face. Whereas what's interesting about the

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Christian faith is that when we look at the scriptures, we see an indictment upon all of our brokenness, upon all of our sin, our lusts, our lies, our theft, our pride.

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We see it essentially shouting to us that we are actually broken and we ought to fear God because God is holy.

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He is righteous. He is true. He is good. He is just, and we're not.

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And when we look in the Bible, we don't look into the Bible as Christians and see this amazing version of ourself at the start.

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We see actually the indictment upon us that here are the standards and we don't live up to them.

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And the only redemption and way of forgiveness and peace and reconciliation with God is through what

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God has provided in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. God come in the flesh.

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Jesus Christ who is the righteous one, the blameless one who dies to take a death of sinners that we actually deserve and he rises again from the dead.

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And so it's a very different approach where when you talk about the Christian faith, you're talking about something that is true outside of yourself.

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It's true outside of your own experience. It's true outside of your own subjective likes and dislikes.

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And so he looks at Islamic culture and he says, I see in Islamic culture, this fear of God.

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I see this culture of discipline. I see this culture of obedience. I see this culture that is flourishing in his mind in terms of the family and all those things.

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And what I want to say to that is, it's okay. And everything good you would see that is truly good in principle in the

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Islamic culture is something that is good because it is borrowed from biblical revelation, the objective revelation that doesn't care if you feel it or not.

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It doesn't care if you like it or not. And I want to say that we have to get away from trying to figure out truth based upon our own inner likes and our preferences.

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We've got to get away from the pursuit of truth that's based upon what feels right to us. And this is very important because what's problematic in the

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West today, and we think about all of the gender bending and the brokenness and the sexual perversions and everything going on that's just so foul and destructive, the people that are doing those things, they see their identity in those things.

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They like that. That's where they see the best version of themselves. And not only that, all of it feels so dang good to them.

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Like it feels good. The Christian faith doesn't come that way. It doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care what you feel.

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It doesn't care about your subjective likes, dislikes, preferences. It's based upon objective revelation and truth.

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God has spoken. We must fear God. Now Tate, again, to his credit, he likes that principle.

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We ought to fear God as his creatures. And I'm going to say yay and amen. And that's borrowed capital from the

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Christian scriptures. Muhammad borrowed the Christian worldview and Christian scriptures to get to his perspective on God and on Christ and on the

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Christian scriptures. And so if you like the moral principles that you'll find in Islam with regard to the family, with regard to fear of God and holiness and righteousness,

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I want to say you should thank Moses for that. You should thank Jesus for that because that's ultimately where it comes from.

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It just gets twisted and distorted. If I went to an Islamic country, I felt God. You don't feel any

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God. How is it a Christian country if Satanists are mocking Jesus on the streets?

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He's making a very good point. You got to give credit to when credit is due and Christians have to be willing to take the hits and say, you know what, that is a failure.

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And I want to say that one of the great failures of the Christian church in the

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West today that needs to be addressed, there's two of them I want to address. Number one is that evangelicalism in the

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West today has a very strange perspective on the law of God in general, and in particular, the law of God in the

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Old Testament. And that misunderstanding that is so different from how

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Christians viewed justice, the just statutes of God in the Old Testament and his righteousness in history, that misunderstanding has caused so much of the degradation of culture and worship today.

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And it has caused so much of the evil that is encroached upon us in the

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West. In other words, Christianity used to speak out with the law of God against evils in culture and society.

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But because today evangelicals have a perverse view of the law of God where they dismiss it like it's not important, it's sort of irrelevant, it's defunct, it's not for us today, you know, this is all about a private individual relationship and romance with Jesus, and God doesn't care about that horrible, harsh law any longer.

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Because Christians view the law of God like that, they're not cultural movers or shakers.

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They don't impact culture. They're afraid to talk about the authority of God's law and culture and society today because they don't believe

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God's law has any authority in culture and in law today. And so because of that,

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Christians over the last few generations have backed away from cultural engagement and being a witness and a light to the culture because fundamentally we misunderstand the law of God in the life of the believer.

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We don't believe this second challenge to Christian culture today. We don't believe that Jesus has all authority on earth today as he says he does in Matthew 28, 18 through 20.

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So what I'm going to say to Tate is when he complains about the Satanist mocking Jesus in the street and how could this be a

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Christian culture, I'm going to say, right, you're right, that should be confronted and it should be confronted with the prophetic voice of the

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Christian church for sure. And it used to be, it used to be that the Christian church was prophetically speaking against the evils and culture with the law, word of God, with the authority of Christ.

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You see it in our laws that are reflected even today. Some of them are hanging by a thread.

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They were based on the law of God, the Christian worldview, and you see it even in laws that haven't been erased from the book yet.

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Christian laws explicitly referring to the scriptures of the Old Testament and New Testament.

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You see the Christians were engaged because they believed in the authority of Christ over all things in heaven and on earth.

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That's the great commission. And it's really important as well because when Tate complains about this Christian culture that does nothing, says nothing, and accomplishes nothing, he's pointing to actually something very important.

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Christians have lost a proper view of the mission of God in the world, the mission of the

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Messiah. Because in truth, the Christian church has always believed that when we bring the message of the gospel and the call to repentance and faith to the world, we're bringing it so that God saves sinners.

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And as he saves sinners, he redeems them, he renews and transforms them.

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And that renewal and transformation actually blesses the world, changes the world, and it changes the worship of the culture.

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It changes culture because if culture is religion externalized, then what happens when a nation is brought to Jesus Christ to salvation?

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Their hearts are changed and that last part of the great commission actually happens. We teach them to obey everything

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Jesus commanded. Well, then they change. The light of Christ and the light of the scriptures changes the world.

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It changes everything. And if you believe that Jesus has ultimate authority, not just in heaven, but on earth today, it affects the world.

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It affects everything. It affects families. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects the legislature.

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It affects justice. It affects the judicial system. It affects businesses.

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It affects commerce. It affects everything. Because if Jesus is Lord of all, then he's

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Lord of everything. And that means that he's in charge and he has the authority. So Tate is right.

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Like, what is going on with these Christians that don't seem to think that Jesus has anything to say about this?

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They don't think he has authority over this in the country? And the answer is, you're right, Andrew, we actually are supposed to.

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And at points in history, you could see glorious moments where we absolutely did. And that's what brought the great blessings to the

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West. But you're right. In this generation, we've got Christians who don't believe that God's law is authoritative and they don't really believe that Jesus is

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Lord over much here, except for in our own little hearts. And so it is a failure.

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Hey, what's up guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at apologiasallaccess at apologiastudios .com.

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