Social Justice and Matt Chandler | Rapp Report Weekly 0018 | Striving for Eternity

Hashtag. Justin, I win.

Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well welcome to another Wrap Report, and this week, well, we're going to deal with this topic that I think everyone else has been talking about anyway. So why are we, the Johnny-come-latelys, jumping on the bandwagon?

Well, because it is an issue so important that it must be dealt with. Actually, I think that this issue that we're going to talk about could possibly be far more dangerous than atheism or Islam has ever been to Christianity.

In fact, I think that the new apostolic reformation and things like that have been far more dangerous than Islam or atheism is to Christianity. And I think that this new topic that we're seeing, this new issue with the social justice warriors is far more dangerous than even the new apostolic reformation.

This is extremely dangerous because A, what it does is exactly what Satan would love the church to do. Get off of Bible and get onto social. Get off of dealing with theology and what the Bible says and start addressing things socially and being just moral like every other man-made religion.

Every single man-made religion. It's one of the ways you can tell the difference of a man-made religion and the one divine religion. It is because every man-made religion has one thing in common. They always, always are focused on morality, on doing good works.

Now, Christians are concerned with doing good works, but not as a means of earning salvation. That's the key. We do good works because the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, came to earth as a man to die on a cross as a payment of the eternal payment of sin.

And he did that in my place. I do good works, not because I have to, not because I desire to try to earn something from God or anyone else. It is because that sin that Christ paid for on the cross, that sin was what I should have paid and he paid it for me.

I love him and want to do good for one reason, because my motivation is to please him for what he has already done for me. That is why I would do things that are right. But what the church is doing is losing its focus on the gospel.

And it's starting to focus on man and trying to please men and trying to get along with a world that hates us. The reality is this. Look, I understand this is an emotional issue for folks. I understand that the issues that we're discussing here on this podcast are very emotionally charged and there's many who will not take the time to apply critical thinking to what we are saying and they're just going to respond emotionally and want to tune us out.

But the reality is this is too important for the church to ignore. We have to be honest with what the Bible says and we have to deal with ourselves in a right state before God, before our fellow man. And the reality that there is not going to be an ultimate justice here on this earth.

We must be concerned about the gospel of Jesus Christ and promoting that more than trying to promote some sort of justice for others, especially while misrepresenting the views of many. I understand it's emotional, but we have to address it.

Now, let me say, I understand that I'm white. Yes, that may surprise people. I'm super white. I mean, I have a very little melanin in my skin, so much so that I burn very easily when in the sunlight. I'm white does not make me guilty for anything that someone else that's white has done.

This is the reality of what is happening is all people are being judged by something that other people have done. I am not responsible for what someone else has done. Now, let me be very clear. My ancestors had absolutely nothing to do with slavery of blacks in America or in Europe.

My ancestors were slaves just a generation ago. My father's generation grew up with my people being slaves in the nation of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, many places where you'd end up having the Jewish people being enslaved for no other reason than the fact that they were Jewish.

And my forefathers, my generations go back to Russia, okay? There's nothing in there where they were involved in the African slave trade. So the reality is that to blame me for something that, for what my forefathers did when my forefathers didn't do it, okay, is insane.

But this is what we're being told and we're being told that this is for the whole church. If you are maybe having your head in the sand and you don't know what's been going on, let me bring you up to speed.

50 years ago, there was a man named Martin Luther King Jr. who marched and really had a big impact socially on trying to bring a discussion and a change in the voting, in the ability for blacks who had a legal right to vote but were not allowed into voting booths to be able to vote.

And he decided that he was going to use peaceful means to protest. And 50 years later, at a conference, and you see this now together for the gospel, gospel coalition, all the ministries involved with these and the pastors involved with these are pushing and promoting when they had that MLK 50 conference.

And they really put the nail in the ground, the stake in the ground to say, we as the church are responsible for racism, even if we think we're not racist. We're just not aware that we're racist. In other words, the assumption is we are racist.

And if we say we're not, then we haven't woke to the fact that we're racist. And we need to be aware of that. Now, we've done some different podcasts dealing with the black church. We've dealt with the issue of racial issues.

And you can look in the past, the archives and see those. But here's the thing. What we have is the church being told that we as the church need to change the message and change the way we go about doing church.

Because whether we realize it or not, somehow we are racist. Just because we're evangelical Christians. Now, there is nothing in the Bible that talks about Christianity tied to color of skin. In fact, if you're going to be accurate to it, those in the Middle East, where the Bible would have been written and Christianity was born, would have had more melanin in their skin than I do and less than an African would.

So they'd be in the middle. And they're not white. They're not black. You don't see that with Christianity. It's not about a color of skin. In fact, when you do see that being addressed, and when you see it is with, first, with Moses and his wife.

And God judged Moses' brother and sister for their viewing of Moses' wife being black and not being white. So he gave them leprosy so they could be really white. And so what we see throughout scripture is God believes that racism is a sin.

Problem is, we have a new definition of racism. I encourage folks to, this is totally off topic, but go get the book 1984. You probably read it when you were in school. Reread it because we're living it.

The whole idea of newspeak where people can change words and a whole culture is accepting of a new definition of terms that every generation before didn't believe. That's what's happening. We are living newspeak.

Andrew, are you saying we cannot anachronistically determine what race is on our modern terms?

It keeps changing. It keeps changing, Vincent.

Did you mean 50 years ago? Did it mean the same thing as today?

Well, no.

I mean, 50 years ago, racism would have been when you take someone, whether it be the color of their skin, the slant in their eyes, whatever structures in their genetics that make them different. And because of that, you group all of them together and you view them as a whole because of the color of their skin or ethnicity or something like that.

And then you start treating them in a way that is because of maybe the color of their skin or whatever the racism that you're doing, that you treat them as less than you would people that look like you.

Now, here's the thing with that. Here's the thing with it. That classic definition that we would see is now being used against the church, even by white folks. They are saying, and we're going to look at one, we're going to examine some, but people who are saying that the church is systemically racist because of the color of their skin.

Well, then you're grouping everyone. I mean, when people tell me that because I'm white, I am responsible for what my forefathers did in the African slave trade because I'm white. My ancestors didn't do anything with that.

They weren't involved in it. And so the reality is, it's a failed argument. But what is it? It's a racist argument by the proper definition, the classical view. Here's a way to know, Vincent, whether we're really talking about color of skin or not.

When men like Clarence Thomas are said that they are not black, why is it Clarence Thomas not black? Because of his politics. It has nothing to do with the color of his skin. How is it that Bill Clinton was called the first black president?

He looks white to me, but his politics, if you don't carry the line and you're black, you're an Uncle Tom. Darrell Harris, we had him on a month or so ago when we dealt with some of this before.

And he said that.

He said that when he as a black man, as an African American man, if he comes out and says and speaks out against this, really it's a socialism, is really what's being told. And this is the thing that people don't even realize the political underpinnings of all.

This.

But when he comes out and speaks about it, people call him Uncle Tom. Why is he an Uncle Tom? Because of what? Because of the politics. Instead of pointing out that these politicians would like to keep people that are black enslaved to voting for them.

That's all they really care about. But let's not get off on that, baby. All right, so here's the thing. The church, there's an appeal to the church right now that the church needs to recognize their racism, even if they're not aware of it.

If they treat people equally and don't recognize color of skin, they have to recognize that they're responsible. And even the Southern Baptist Convention, I mean, I think they're going to apologize for like the 15th time for their racism.

I mean, when is it enough? When is it that we can move on and say, okay, there were wrongs in the past and we need to move on from that?

Andrew, I'd like to point out, I just don't, when we say there's wrongs in the church, I just don't want to associate that the biblical church with the church, maybe what we call the church in America.

And I think there should be a clear delineation. What is the actual church versus what is perceived as the church? Sometimes, because I think a lot of that is putting, placing blame on the actual church when it's not so much the actual church of Christ that he died for.

I'm not saying that those persons are innocent and everything, but a lot of times the blame is placed on what the popular conception of what the church is in the culture versus what is the true church.

Well, okay, let's look at this. Has the church, let's start with the heretical church that claims to be the church.

That would be a good start.

Let's start there. Has the Roman Catholic church done things that are wrong and sinful in the name of Christ?

Yes.

Can we say the inquisitions? I mean, where Jews were being tortured and killed to convert or die. That's not how conversion works, folks.

Nope.

But has the biblical church also done things wrong, trying to do good in the name of God? Yes. And mind you, some of the people, we're going to play a video of somebody, and I think he is trying to do right in his mind.

He's trying to right wrongs he sees. He's trying to get the church to help put an end to racism.

I see that.

So here becomes my issue is where do they determine what is right and wrong? And I think we'll get into that in the discussion. Because my thing is where's their foundation for what is right and wrong?

Because a lot of people view that as a societal issue and not an absolute subjective issue that we need to discuss.

Well, they're not going to get that from the Bible. Okay, and I'll tell you why. In the Bible, you had two races of people who, one that really were ethnicities that really didn't like the other. You had Jews and Gentiles.

Okay.

A Jewish person was not even to enter a Gentile home because that would make him unclean.

Okay.

There wasn't a love affair with them. All right. So the reality is when you look at this, you have to face the fact that here you have two groups of people that did not get along, did not, well, at least on the one side for sure, didn't like the other.

And yet when Christ comes, he rips that veil that separates man and God. But Paul argues in Ephesians that that veil is to represent the distinction as well between Jew and Gentile. It's ripped apart.

There is no separation now. And so we are to be one people of God. If that is the way God has it for the church, is it any different in the world?

No.

And identifying people even as being white or black and seeing them as in that way is racism because you're seeing color first. If you're going to see them by ethnicity, that's still the same thing. You're putting that first.

That's what the culture wants. That's why they want to do a divide and conquer.

Okay.

And the reality is that we as the church should be saying we are one race, the human race. Biology supports it and the Bible supports it. There's no reason we should be arguing for anything else. And yet we're arguing in, we're people trying to argue in the church that we should recognize if we're white and white is no longer white.

Let me, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording. There is a new book coming out from InterVarsity Press Academic and it's marked at intermediate level, which means this is an intermediate academic work.

And the title of it is can quote white unquote people be saved? Can white people be saved? A whole bunch of authors that worked on this book, people that contributed to it. It's part of a series on, you know, missions.

And this one is called or subtitled is Triangulating Race, Theology and Missions. But here's how they sell this book.

No one is born white. Wait, stop.

Hold it.

Stop the presses.

You're not born white.

So white has anything to do with the color of skin. So yeah, I guess not.

No one is born white.

But while there is no biological basis for a white race, whiteness is real. See, now right there you see whiteness. This is now a way of thinking that they're addressing. This has nothing to do with skin.

It has to do with the thinking. And you're supposed to carry the party line. I mean, this is exactly, folks, I'm sorry, politically, this is how socialism works. This is how fascism worked, is you have to recognize the party line and you can't question it.

If people question this talk of whiteness, you're immediately labeled as a racist, not as a critical thinker, which you would be. So let's go on to what it says in this promotionist book. What's more, whiteness as a way of being in the world has more parasitically, has been parasitically joined to Christianity.

So being white is somehow a parasite to Christianity. Interesting. This is the view that they have, and they refer to this as the heresy of whiteness. And so they're going to make the case, I guess, that whiteness can't be saved.

Well, neither can blackness then, if you're going to argue for that. You can't say that.

This is a fundamental foundation issue that they don't. Their starting point is absolutely incorrect. Every single color person in this earth deserves damnation. And if you don't start there, then you're at a faulty starting point.

It doesn't matter anything physical. If you talk of physicality, you're no different than the atheists that start with their metaphysics of materialism. I mean, really.

Or their relativism, right? That there is no absolutes.

Oh, yeah. Relativism, post-modernism, you're starting at the same point that everyone else outside of the Christian worldview starts.

And this is the thing. We start with the Bible. That is the basis for our argumentation. And when the church is going to use social ethics and views of agendas that are anti-Christian to promote and say that this is what the church should be promoting, it's a real problem.

Look, folks, it seems to make sense. I understand we want to right the wrongs of the past. We want justice. But guess what? The church has done wrong in the name of Christ. But the atheists have done wrong, and the Muslims have done wrong, and everyone has done wrong because we have a sinful nature.

We're born sinful. And this is the thing that they don't want to address. But the reality is I am not responsible for what someone else does. This is just a core thing that I can't understand why people can't comprehend that.

And the fact that people want to blame others for what someone else does where they had nothing to do with it, it's not from the Bible. That's not a biblical way of seeking justice. Now, let me give two ethnic groups that have been persecuted in more recent years than the Africans that were taken as slaves.

We have the Chinese in America that were slaves even when slavery was outlawed in America. In the West, they were treated as slaves. They were not paid, and they overcame it.

Can I say this?

Sure.

Even Muslims. In Muslim nations, certain versions of Muslims were probably treated way worse than what we would call skin-tone slavery in our time. I mean they have different views of their own religious system that they will persecute far more than they will outsiders.

But see, here's the thing, why I want to bring up the Chinese and the Jewish people. Because there's something they did. They were treated based on racism. They were treated differently. And because of that, they sought a different means of resolving the issue culturally than what we see here in America with the African-Americans.

Not as a whole with the African-Americans, but the agenda that's trying to be pushed. You see, what happened with the Chinese, they said we need to educate our next generation. We need to have educated people that can get into the positions that they would have more say and be able to provide for their next generation.

They saw themselves as sacrificing for the next generation. They were willing to suffer so that their kids could have a better life than them, be more educated than them.

Same with the Jewish people.

The Jewish people, there's a reason so many of them are lawyers and doctors. Because those are positions that make money. Those are positions where with the money, they're going to have the power. They recognize that the only way to prevent themselves from being constantly put aside and put into concentration camps and things like that is to have the power to prevent it from happening.

So what you're saying, they understand the system they're in, and instead of wholesale just outright fighting it, they live within that system and thrive within it in order to make betterment for their future generations is what you're saying.

Yeah, it's exactly what it is. I mean, they're not looking for handouts. They're not looking to play the victim. They look to say, how do we overcome this? And they do it as a culture. And this is what we see that's been different with what we see in America.

Because here we see people who have, I'm sorry, but we have people who make money off of racism. We have people who get power because of racism. Barack Obama, read his own book and his own words. He says that he knew that as someone with black skin raised in a white society, he could get white votes and he, because of the color of his skin, that he could stay in office forever.

Now he became president, which meant he couldn't stay in office forever. But here's the reality. Here's someone that knew that he could use the color of his skin to get a political position for life. And you have people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who use what anyone else would call thuggery.

It's mob tactics. To be honest.

It is.

To be honest, Barack Obama did get it for life because once you're president, you're set for life.

You are, yeah. He doesn't have to work anymore. But the point being is that you have these people who make money based on the fact that they have to keep racism going. And they're the ones running out and telling everyone how to deal with the racism.

Well, here's how you end racism. It's really simple. You want to end racism? Stop being racist. On all sides. You can't reverse racism. That's racist. And I know there's many who say that just because I'm white, I can't say these things.

I'm sorry. This has nothing to do with the way I treat other people. Some of my best friends in high school were black. Why? Because I didn't see color. When I dated a black girl and all of a sudden all of my black friends couldn't be friends with me anymore because I was dating a black girl and that wasn't allowed.

The reality is I had friends that were told they couldn't hang out with me anymore. And I said, excuse me? How is that just because I'm dating someone? That is what racism is. See, if you don't see color of skin, you don't see racism.

And that's really what the church needs to be saying. The church needs to say, look, let's end racism by not seeing people as by just the color of their skin and assuming things of them. You know, I'll be honest.

If I was black, I would be insulted at what these folks are saying. I'd be insulted that they say that I'm not smart enough or intelligent enough to learn and to get good jobs and be able to do things without handouts and without help.

The reality is that the handouts have been going for years, generations now. If it was just, well, we need this handout, we need to get blacks in college. The number of blacks that have gotten into college has been on the rise.

Why has the whole racism not changed yet? Because the people who are making the money and getting power off this are still needed to continue. And, you know, I wish I had the quote that Daryl Harris had given to me.

He gave a quote when he was on the show. And, you know, back when there was slavery, and I forget who it was that he got the quote from, but basically it was saying that there are, you know, slavery, that the racism wouldn't end because there's people that profit from it.

And that's what we're seeing, folks. We really are, and it's now affecting the church. My reason I see this as being so dangerous to the church is it changes the message of the gospel. We're becoming more about social justice than we are the gospel of Jesus Christ, that God Almighty died in our place, and he paid the punishment that we owe, that we could be set free from sin.

That's the message of the church.

That's the issue.

That's the very issue.

That is everything, because if you, any gains in this world above what you gain in Christ, it's like, what is your end goal? Because to die to self and to die to this world, that's the real gain? I don't think a lot of people in this day and age really view that as the ultimate goal.

Okay, so let me ask this question. John, let me ask you. Will there be true justice in this life?

In this life?

Yeah, exactly.

No.

No, and that's the whole thing. As Christians, we don't live for the here and now. We live here and now. We live in this world. But as Peter says, we're passing through. We're sojourners in this world.

Our citizenship is in heaven. That's where our focus should be, where there will be true justice. You know, I remember, okay, I'm going to date myself and you guys are going to know this, but someone in the audience may not.

Okay, so I remember that day that, you know, we all watched glued to a TV, watching a white Bronco driving down the…. See, you're laughing. You know exactly what I'm referring to.

But I had to say it was a white Bronco.

And we were all glued to a TV to watch this slow car chase of OJ Simpson. And when that court trial went and basically he was found innocent and it was discovered that like all the jurors figured that if they called him innocent, they can make better money on book deals.

That's all they were concerned with, it seems. And they wanted to punish white people. And so therefore they were going to let him go for what he did to someone. He killed two people as far as it seems from evidence, not whether he can make a glove look like it did not fit.

But the reality is that the jurors even said afterwards, it wasn't about the evidence that convicted him. It was about their views of the world and the book deals they could get. And the reality is this.

My pastor had told me his wife sat there, they watched the verdict, and he said, there is no justice. And his wife turned and said, not yet. The reality for every wrong, I mean, for, you know, OJ Simpson, if he murdered those two people, if he doesn't repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, a justice will come for him.

There will be justice. Was there a justice for all the sins that I committed? Absolutely there was at the cross when an eternal being took the full weight of my sin upon himself. Being an eternal being, he paid that for all of eternity in a way that I can never comprehend what that's like.

But he took the full weight of sin upon himself. There was a punishment. There was a justice. Even though I may not be the one that ends up paying it, God himself paid it on my behalf. And the reality is that there is no justice in this world and we're trying to make everything just.

There will be some levels of justice. But to shift from the only message that saves people, offers forgiveness of sin, and brings them to true justice with God, righteousness with God, to talk about what we should do for our culture.

Look, I am very much against short-term mission trips that go and hammer nails and dig wells. That's not missions. I'm sorry. It's great to do. Go there and help other people. That's good. But don't call that missions.

The mission for the church should be to go and share the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's the mission of the church. That's what we should be doing. Now, we're going to take a break. I want to play a commercial and then after that, we want to deal with someone that is arguing that the church should be actually focused on this sort of stuff.

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So with that, I want to, what we're going to do, John, Vincent, I will play this. You guys just raise your hands when you want me to stop. And I'm going to just, we're going to see, and it's only seven minutes long, but I have a funny feeling it's going to take us some time to get through this.

I could be mistaken, but let's see. Okay, so the thing says how to understand. Let me just stop that for a second because some people who are listening couldn't read that. So the wording that was on the screen as there was silence right here, and the thing says how to understand and address white privilege.

So that's what this is going to be about, how to understand and address white privilege.

Here's what that looked like.

And I should say, this is Matt Chandler who is speaking.

When I sat in school growing up and learned about the history of the United States of America, I opened up our books. I had to write reports. I saw in those books and read the stories of and wrote reports on people who looked like me.

And then when I turned on the television, by and large, at any moment in time, when I turned on the television, what I saw was people who looked like me. And then when I got magazines or when I got books or when I played with toys or what I saw repeatedly were people that looked like me.

At almost any given moment, I was surrounded by people who looked almost just like me. And so the entire experience of my life has been one of I can easily find people that look like me. Almost all my understanding of what made America great is because of efforts and the work ethic of people like me.

Okay, so just because people look like him, and guess what, Matt? They don't look like you. They look very different. I mean, there's some that are whiter than you, some that are darker than you. They'd still be considered white.

Some wear blonde hair. Some wear black hair. They don't have the brown hair that you have. I mean, the reality is he's arguing this. And I think one of the things that I see frustrating is the presupposition that he has here is that you have to understand that because whites are teaching other whites, that somehow that's wrong.

That somehow they're not going to be able to see what it is that they're doing and believing and saying. Now, this last part he said of what makes America great, I don't know any of our founding documents.

I don't know any of the things within the founding of this country that said that whiteness is what made America. I think what it was that started this country was religious freedom. Freedom from England that was oppressing people, over-forcing them to believe what the state said they had to believe.

And not having the freedom to worship God as the Bible would have. Having a biblical view of Christianity and of God and of the Bible. And that's what made America great. It was the Christian values that were installed in the founding of this country by people who came here because they wanted to worship God.

And all the talk of rewriting history of how we wiped out the Native Americans. The Native Americans, why were they not a huge population? Why were their tribes so small? Because they were wiping each other out.

I mean, face the facts. We ignore what was going on. Did we do damage? Yeah, well, as we expanded and pushed Native Americans out of their lands, we did exactly what Native Americans did to one another, but in a greater way because there was a larger population.

They civil, they weren't nomadic. They civilized in areas and that made changes. But that doesn't mean it was wrong. In fact, we celebrate Thanksgiving where the original pilgrims, the Christians, got along with the Native Americans and worked together because the Christians were seeking to share the gospel with them.

That's what made America great, Mr. Chandler. What made America great was that we had Christian values.

I was going to throw in also the fact that he says that when he read his history, he saw a lot of people like him. My point is just because they may look like him doesn't mean that they're like him. There's a big difference.