Is Jesus Coming Soon?

Welcome. Look at that lively studio audience, guys. Welcome back to Next Week with Jeff Durbin, guys. So God has used a lot of people in my life to shape my thinking, to encourage me to sort of change the course of my life and sort of bolster my commitment to God's Word and really seeing what it actually says.

And one of those, the list is actually relatively short in terms of people who I really consider heroes of the faith and people that have really are directly responsible for the ministry that I am involved in.

And one of those people is Gary DeMar. We call him Uncle Gary. He's senior fellow with American Vision and was past president of American Vision. He has a new book. It's called Wars and Rumors of Wars.

We're having him on today on this Thanksgiving episode because Gary is well known for his work in the history of Christianity in the United States, biblical worldview, biblical.

Law.

And so please welcome to Next Week, Gary DeMar.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

What's up, Uncle Gary?

Eschatology, Worldview, and the Christian's Responsibility

Just a bunch of stuff, you know, still trying to deal with what's going on in the world and trying to get Christians involved in every area of life. And hopefully they're seeing all the things that are going around them today as a fulfillment of 2 Peter 3, where Paul tells Timothy, they will not make further progress for their folly will be obvious to all.

There you go.

And Paul gives that instructions on what to do while we're seeing the collapsing, unbelieving world views collapse around us is that we just continue on with what God has called us to do in every area of life.

Now, Gary, one of the really dramatic impacts you've had on my life is early on, I wasn't raised in a Christian home. And so when I really got into church and went to Bible college, even the eschatological view or the view of end times that I held was really the popular view of the day, sort of codified in the Left Behind series, books by Tim LaHaye and those sorts of things.

As I was really, really rediscovering what the Bible said, really for the first time for me in terms of just saying, what does the text say? One of the books that I read was End Times Fiction. It's just a little book you wrote, End Times Fiction.

It was really a response to the Left Behind series. And that set me off on really a whole new course, discovering really the eschatology of the Puritans, more of a historic, biblically rigorous view of eschatology, of the future.

And so you have spent so much time in your life in ministry, Gary, trying to develop a biblical worldview in believers and trying to develop an optimistic view of the future, the kind of view of the future that tries to impact every realm with the gospel.

And so you wrote a book called God and Government. You've spent a lot of time really trying to challenge the popular eschatologies of the.

Day.

Gary, why are you involved in that kind of work? Why spend your time in trying to develop a rigorous, consistent biblical worldview and face all of this stuff around us when the world's just going to burn anyways?

Well, when I first started getting into this worldview issues and did my series on God and Government, when I went out to speak on these issues, I would find people in the audience bringing up the eschatological issue.

And they would say, wait a minute, we're living in the last days. This is the terminal generation. Jesus is coming back in our lifetime. And so any effort being put into trying to change the world would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Why are we wasting our time? So I got into the eschatological side of things from two realms. First was what the Bible had to say about these things, and also, secondly, by history. Because if you go back and look at the history of our nation, you go back to the pilgrims and the Puritans, there's almost no speculation regarding eschatology.

All of their original documents, you know, they put their lives on the line to come over here to start a brand-new world. I mean, if they actually believed that the world was going to be coming to an end in their day, they wouldn't have gone to Holland at first, and then they wouldn't have come to what is today America, second, because they would have thought, well, Jesus is coming.

Soon.

Look how bad things are for us. I mean, the religious institutions of the day were persecuting them. The political side was persecuting them. Things that are going on in our day today were going on back then.

But their eschatology was such that it motivated them to build a city on a hill. And we need to, this Thanksgiving, we should remember what their emphasis was.

Absolutely.

And with that in mind, too, I mean, just speaking about worldview, Gary, it's a good question to ask. You know, you spend even a lot of time not just dealing with sort of the government issues and the historical context of the Puritans and really Christianity, the eschatology.

You've spent a lot of time even trying to develop a rigorous apologetic against sort of an atheistic or agnostic, secularist, humanist worldview. And it's a good question to ask. What, pray tell, would the atheist have to be thankful for or who is he thanking?

Right?

Thanksgiving, Atheism, and the Christian Basis for Gratitude

Well, that's a good question. And basically, they're just thankful. They're, you know, they could, and anything that they are truly thankful for is borrowed from the Christian worldview. I don't know if you heard, I don't know if it was yesterday, that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was, she wouldn't allow anyone that was questioning her from the press to ask a question until they stated what they were thankful for, which a lot, of course, liberals were upset about the how dare she do that.

But it was interesting to hear some of the things that they said. They're thankful for their wives or their husbands or, you know, they're for their family and friends and so forth. And so that is a, that's the fruit of a Christian worldview.

There isn't anything to be thankful within an atheistic worldview, that the things that come at you are simply the motions of time and matter coming together and bringing about things that may be painful and might be pleasurable, but you can't add any sort of moral basis to those things.

And so anytime an atheist talks about being thankful, and you have to ask, where did this idea, concept of thankfulness come from? It certainly didn't originate in the early, you know, goo to you type evolutionary process.

Thankfulness is something that comes from the heart, but there is no heart within atheism. There's simply, we're simply, you know, meat machines. And so the unbeliever has a real problem with thankfulness because there's really no one ultimately to thank, and the idea of thankfulness can find no basis for you, there's no account, there's no way to account for it within a secular matter only worldview.

That's right, and I think one of the beautiful parts of, say, Thanksgiving, these moments, these bright and shining moments in the unbeliever's life, is that in those moments they're imaging God, they're showing really who they know they really are.

And it's really a beautiful thing. So I don't want to diminish the value of having an atheist be thankful, but it's a good point that only the biblical worldview provides a meaningful foundation for thankfulness in the first place.

So enjoy your turkey, atheist. So another good thing to talk about here, Gary, would be, in terms of, you mentioned the pilgrims, you know, going to Holland, they saw that their children were being impacted by the culture, they weren't okay with what was happening, so they went back, and now, okay, we're making a trip westward to create a civilization for the glory of Jesus over on this new continent.

Now they viewed all of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. They didn't compartmentalize like many evangelicals do today, where they'll see, you know, this realm over here is a spiritual, that's the church stuff, and then this realm over here, that's government, that's sort of hands-off for Jesus, he doesn't really have any authority.

There.

Can you just talk for a bit, because you wrote a wonderful book, a delicious book, God and Government, make sure you guys get it, by Gary DeMar, talk about that, just in terms of how they viewed all of life under the authority of Jesus, they didn't compartmentalize like many evangelicals do today, they saw everything under the rule of Jesus, and everything was touched by his authority.

Christ's Lordship Over Every Sphere of Life

Well, first of all, like in the God and Government series, they recognize that God was the governor of all things, and they also recognize that to be a responsible subject of God himself, we had to exhibit self-government under God, and then the family came next, and then the church, and then the civil sphere, and everything in between.

And so one of the first things that they did when they came to create this colony was, of course, they established a church, a place of worship, but they also established schools. And almost every colonial college, from Harvard, and Yale, and Rutgers, and Columbia, which was called King's College, I believe every colonial college was established by these Puritans.

Now, they understood that if you're going to perpetuate a Christian worldview, you have to be trained in the process of doing all of that. Now, unfortunately, there was kind of a mixture of classical education in with all that, but they understood that if you're going to have dominion for the next generation, you had to raise up in this generation by laying, as the Harvard rules and precepts stated, you had to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of knowledge.

Yeah.

And other than the University of Pennsylvania, all of the early colonial colleges were established with Jesus Christ as the foundation of their educational pursuits.

Very good.

And you've actually directly impacted so many people in terms of biblical worldview thinking, in terms of education. Talk for just a moment here about the importance of, because they did it then, it was just assumed that the church is sort of leading the way for education.

Public schools weren't really a thing. Talk just for a moment about the importance of Christian education for our children over against a public school system.

Christian Education and the Rise of Secular Public Schooling

Well, early on, it's unfortunate that many of the colonists did get the state involved in education, but they just, they assumed that they were going to control the state. And over time, I think with a kind of a dualistic worldview, you began to see this in Harvard that they separate, it began to separate the religious, you know, from the more so-called academic secular side of things.

And so you had these two tracks that people were involved in. So you had the religious over here and the secular over here. That wasn't the way Harvard and Yale and what today is Princeton were set up.

But over time, that's what ended up happening. And so people felt comfortable with the government getting involved because generally the nation was Christian. I mean, even many of our founders like John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, you know, weren't what we would call today evangelical Christians.

I mean, certainly Jefferson wasn't. But they understood that God was at the center of things. And you can see this in their, for example, their Thanksgiving declarations. And so over time, however, Christians felt comfortable in allowing the state to be involved in education because it was fundamentally Christian in the early days.

When I went to high school, I mean, we said the Lord's Prayer and had a Bible reading every morning. But that was it. And but most people went to church on, you know, on Sunday and we were this Jewish family that went to synagogue on Saturday.

The nation was kind of had a civil religion and public education was somewhat moralistic in its Christian outlook until the early 1960s, when Madeleine Murray O 'Hare came in and began to challenge Bible reading in the public schools and also prayer.

But the government has made it difficult for Christians to understand all of this, and they've made it easier for them to believe that they're getting a free education. And so people, a lot of Christians have kind of, you know, sold themselves on this idea, but we can we can modify what's being taught in the educational system by, you know, Wednesday evening service, you know, Sunday morning, Sunday school and so forth.

But that is just plain impossible. And I think a lot of Christians also kind of have a nostalgic understanding of public education because, you know, they came up through it and they're fine. But today, public education or government education is purely secular.

There isn't a there isn't a Christian stripe anywhere in the public school system.

That's true. That's true. So last thing here, Gary, I just the other day I saw a clip of you on a Christian television program and you were talking about your book Wars and Rumors of Wars, your new book.

And I don't think that the hosts really knew who they were talking to.

That's not the first time I remember going to Kansas City. This was a number of years ago and the producer of the show said, Gary, we want you to come and talk about eschatology. And I said, are you sure?

And she says, yes. I've got it all worked out. You're going to come. So I fly in and I go to the studio and then the host of the show says, now, what are we talking about today? And the producer said, we're going to talk about Bible prophecy.

She says, absolutely not. So here I flew all the way to Kansas City and I sat down and we ended up coming up with a completely different show and providentially it turned out well. I ended up talking about my God and Government series.

So I don't understand. We sent them five copies of Wars and Rumors of Wars and I said, look, are you sure this is the topic you want to talk about? I can talk about other things as well. I said, no, no, this is good.

And so everybody who's kind of commented on it, you know, can see that the hosts of the show either weren't aware of my of my position or was only only aware of some of my position. But it just kind of showed that they they weren't really up on what what I was all about.

It turned out very well. They were very gracious, said they're going to have me come back on again. I'm not real sure that's going to take place. But it was it was a fun, fun 10 minutes. I got to visit some friends in Pittsburgh.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and ate at some of my favorite restaurants.

Right on.

That's when you had that. You had like an Afro and you were like lifting weights.

Right.

Yeah.

That was a long time ago. I was in much, much better shape, but I can still do 40 push ups, you know, so I'm OK.

Well, good.

So.

Wars and Rumors of Wars, Media Interviews, and Closing Remarks

So Wars and Rumors of Wars. That's a new book. Where can people go to get it?

They can go to American Vision dot org, American Vision dot org and order it there. I believe it's also on on Amazon. And if you want to watch the clip, if you go to my Facebook page, you'll see the 10 minute clip.

It really turned out very well. A lot of people were very appreciative of it and made some very good comments on it as well. And then you can do you can tell your people to contact the folks, the folks at Cornerstone TV and say, hey, you really like that 10 minute clip that Gary DeMar was on.

We want you to have him back and spend a whole lot more time discussing the topic of eschatology.

That's right. Give Uncle Gary one hour to talk about Matthew 24 and then freak everybody out.

Yeah.

Cornerstone TV. Send him an email.

That's right.

All right.

Hey, one last thing, Gary. When you come back out, let's get dinner again, OK?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

My treat next time.

Oh, sounds good. All right, brother.

All right.

Well, happy Thanksgiving, man. Thanks for joining us on the show today.

All right.

God bless you.

Thank you, Uncle Gary, everybody. All right, guys. Thank you very much.

We'll be right back.

Stay with us.

Important stuff next, guys.

We'll be right back, guys.

Next week with Jeff Durbin, the late night show with the unpopular opinion. Tuesday, only on Facebook Live.