Autonomians and Where to Find Them

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Okay, grab a Bible, something to write with, we are going to get started.

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We are glacially working our way through the book of Leviticus. Still. Still, that's right.

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And I really appreciate the Leviticus reference in the sermon. Yes, I throw that in there.

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So to help you kind of work ahead. Yeah, prepare. Right. Still Leviticus.

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All right, let's pray. Oh Lord our God, how blessed we are. Not only have you given us your word, which offers in parts to us all the fruits of the redemption of your dear son

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Jesus Christ, you have opened our eyes so that we may know your grace and in firm confidence receive it.

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Though the world, the law, our own hearts and our consciences condemn us, what do we care?

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Your word declares us free of all guilt. Keep us in such faith and to our end and grant that all the members of our congregation may appreciate the great treasure which they possess.

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Help them and us to triumph over all attacks of the devil, the world and our flesh, and finally to depart this life in peace and be received into your eternal kingdom.

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Hear us for the sake of our risen and victorious champion, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. All right.

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These are famous last words. You're talking about how the demons have asked permission to do anything.

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Yeah. So by that reasoning, wouldn't they have had to ask permission to enter the guy in the first place?

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Yeah. The only thing I can assume is Jesus allowed that to later demonstrate his deity.

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Yeah. So the book of Job kind of helps us out in that sense, too. I mean, there's Job, right?

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And he complains that the Lord has put a hedge around him. I think it's hilarious when you talk about that hedge of protection, how people pray hedges.

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I think these are very powerful shrubberies. But anyway, I'm sorry.

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Every time I hear somebody talk about praying a hedge of protection, I'm thinking, dang, you know. That's just silly.

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But anyway, and so the devil has to ask for permission. And then the

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Lord says, okay, you can do this much but not further than this. And so you'll note then that Luther had a funny way of putting it.

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He said that the devil is God's devil. And that's technically true. Now, the funny thing is that the other part of what our gospel text ends up blowing up in our minds, so many people believe in this concept of dualism, that somehow in the universe you have a good force, a good

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God, and an equally bad and evil and equally powerful force that is opposing the truth.

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So there's this tussle between light and darkness, good and evil. And they seem to be evenly matched.

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But you'll note as we read through the Gospels, the devil doesn't even come close to Jesus.

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I mean, I always like pointing out that when Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, so he's going to go mano a mano with the devil himself.

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And so Jesus, in preparation for it, I was like, you think about the Rocky movie. You think there's

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Burgess Meredith screaming at Rocky. Come on, Rock! Give me more, Rock!

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And stop paying attention to those women! Women weaken legs, Rock! And so the workout montage, he's running up the stairs of the government.

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And jogging down the street, he's drinking eggs and all this kind of stuff. And finally the bell rings and he's ready to fight, right?

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Jesus doesn't do that. He's getting ready to go mano a mano with the devil, so Jesus decides

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I'm going to stop eating for 40 days. It says about Jesus, it's like he was hungry.

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Yeah, I can't even go four hours. I'll come crawling down the stairs. Barb, is it dinner time yet?

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I had a snack at two and it's five and I don't know if I'm going to make it till six. True story.

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Jesus goes 40 days and it says he's hungry, he's thirsty, he's at his weakest.

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And he's out in the wilderness and this is the days before Chapstick. We all know what's going on here. I say that only because my wife is addicted to that substance, but that's a different story.

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And so you'll note then here Jesus going against a legion of demons. You're expecting this cataclysmic conflict and the demons are all, oh

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Jesus, oh don't send us into the abyss

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Jesus. It's like, what is this, right? There's like no contest, none whatsoever.

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Dualism is out of the question, totally out of the question. Christ is in charge and there's just no way around it.

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Now Bruce, you look like you just sucked on a lemon or something.

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It hurts, but we're good. Alright, well at the behest of our

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Congregational President, we're going to take a look at the book of Leviticus. Oh there it goes, hands up. I have a different question though.

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It's actually about the sermon. It has nothing to do with certain passages. So you talked at the end of the sermon and I was kind of amazed, but I want more clarification of Jesus sending the man back to say what

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God has done for you. And in the Lutheran tradition you just turn three heads and in tennis we don't do testimonials.

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Why? What's the difference? That's actually a fascinating question.

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So we'll start off in the abuse of such testimonies.

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On my podcast we have a Max Holliday sketch and the name of it is

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Ergen Kanner's Testimony Enhancement Spray. It's a product that we've invented. If you don't know the story of Ergen Kanner, Ergen Kanner was a fellow who after the 9 -11 attacks claimed that he was trained by Al -Qaeda and that he converted to Christianity and all this kind of stuff.

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And it was an amazing testimony. The problem was that he was making the whole thing up.

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He grew up in Ohio. He went to a normal American school. He was not trained by Al -Qaeda.

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And so his testimony is as boring as boring gets. But thanks to Ergen Kanner's Testimony Enhancement Spray, his testimony is now the bee's knees.

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And so in Evangelicalism what happens is that they substitute the saving work of Christ and the impact it has on our lives for the gospel itself.

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And what ends up happening is that it creates then this really interesting thing.

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And that is that if you grew up, you were baptized as a child.

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You grew up in the church and you were confirmed. And then you got married and you were faithful to your spouse and you raised your kids.

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The worst thing that happened to you is that you were late paying your taxes back in 1978 by a week or two and you had to pay a fine.

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And of course that is like something that pains you to this day. That's the worst thing that you can look at.

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You look at somebody's testimony. They'll say, yeah, I was down and out. I was living on Skid Row.

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I was drug addicted. And somebody preached the gospel to me in Christ to save me. And thankfully now

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I'm sober and all of this. You sit there and go, my testimony is boring.

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And you sit there and it really creates some weird distortions.

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And it does create the pressure within evangelicalism to have a compelling testimony.

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Because, and here's the other part of it. Yeah, good news.

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With Ergen Kanner's Testimony Enhancement Spray, we do have a testimonial from somebody who used it who was a boarding accountant.

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And after he used the Testimony Enhancement Spray, it turns out that he was actually a pirate. And he used to sail the seven seas and stuff.

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Yeah, I've watched people's brains blow out. You know, you're like, yeah, you can't probably put that on CNN, but we don't, that also does not set us up.

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If proof of Christ is how glorious I am, and suddenly you have a Roman seven day, or say, you know, you're as righteous and holy.

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Only one Roman seven day? That's like every day of the week for me, right? Or you succeed like King David in the fruits of your life, then that becomes like an attack

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Satan can use against the gospel. Right, so then, kind of continue to work this out then. So it becomes not only a substitute for the gospel, it becomes an underpinning for the theology of self -glory.

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You know, so the more radical your transformation, the more real you are as a

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Christian. And it's, yeah. And so now your faith is not based in what

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Christ did. And so we as Christians, okay, so if we were to go and proclaim all that God has done for you,

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I'm gonna start with Christ bleeding and dying for our sins.

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And then Him dragging me into His kingdom. And now the painful process of God the

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Holy Spirit working out of me. You know, basically returning me to the waters of my baptism so I drown my sinful nature, put on the new man every day, take off the old one.

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And it's just a complete drudgery. But the thing is that when you look at the spectacular things like that and your emphasis is not on the cross, then what happens is it has a tendency to puff up and it fits perfectly within the theology of self -glory.

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I look at a woman like Katie Sousa. Katie Sousa, she has, well, by all intents and purposes, like an amazing testimony.

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This is a woman who used to cook meth. She spent time in prison. She's had guns drawn on her.

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She's drawn guns on other people. She was a complete con woman. And yet she is still continuing to be a con woman because the theology she traffics in is utter nonsense.

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And so as a result of that, you know, but people don't challenge her because they go, well, look, she went from being drug addicted to now being somebody who preaches sermons at church.

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And you say, do you not see that those are the same thing? Right? That's the same thing.

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Now here's the thing. When you preach the law correctly then, it's going to have the same impact on all of us.

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And we have to recognize, we've got to take away this hierarchy of sin thing. If you see yourself as different than the drug addicted, you do not rightly understand the sin in your life.

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Exactly. Here's the thing. I have found that the drug addicted, they have the obvious sins.

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Me, on the other hand, I have the subtle and pernicious ones, which are as damning if not more damning.

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And so the idea then, when you preach the law and gospel correctly, what it does is it doesn't create a hierarchy based of experience.

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It creates a completely level playing field to where each and every one of us, like we come to the

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Lord's Supper on our knees because we are sinners in need of the forgiveness of Christ.

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And Scripture teaches us to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought, but instead to consider others as better than ourselves.

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And so there is no currency in Scripture as far as, well, this person has a radical transformation, this person's blasé and kind of vanilla milk toast.

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No, and you'll note that even though the Apostle Paul, he has one of the most amazing transformations ever.

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And people have likened, and I like this way of looking at it, the Apostle Paul's conversion to Christianity is as spectacular if Hitler had converted to Judaism.

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That's how amazing it is. And yet Paul, in talking about how

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Christ has saved him, that is just the smallest piece of the story.

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And he continues, that's not a badge of honor for him. Every time he recounts what he did, that's a badge of shame.

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And he talks about it in terms of, I was the least of the apostles.

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I was abnormally born, but yet Christ had mercy on me. And so he never speaks of his sin in such a way where he says,

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I was this, but now I'm that. Isn't it great? I did that, and I am so ashamed of that, and Christ has forgiven me of it.

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Totally different thing altogether. Totally different thing altogether. Being in the

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Gideon Archipelago, and there's the other ones where, one example is one of the youngest rabbis to ever be dean of the

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Trinity School. And he studied both the

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Old and New Testament. And he happened to be reading John, and the Holy Spirit spoke to him, and all of a sudden, he believed.

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It was not a, I was a terrible guy, and all of a sudden, you know.

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Right. And there's the dichotomy. I was a terrible guy, and now I'm a good guy.

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But even there, he wasn't a terrible guy. He was just an idolater who spoke against Christ publicly. Exactly.

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But that's not a terrible sin, like if you write somebody in prison, you know.

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Right, yeah. So here's the thing is, when rightly understanding God's law, it levels all of us, and we recognize then that it's through the word that Christ gives us faith.

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Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ. So this rabbi, he's reading the book of John, and conversion happens like that.

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And he didn't go from being a bad guy to being a good guy. He went from being an impenitent idolater and sinner to being a forgiven idolater and sinner.

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When you think about it, there's lots of religions that can turn a bad guy into a better guy. Uh -huh. Didn't Islam do that for Muhammad Ali?

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Let's be blunt. Come on, come on. Cassius Clay's early history, that's nothing to be proud of.

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Did you all watch his funeral? What a complete vacuous mess that was. And let's be blunt, okay?

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How many organizations out there can put people forward, I was bad and now

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I'm good? Alcoholics Anonymous does this, and they don't require you to repent and be forgiven by Christ.

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You just need to confess and believe that there's a higher power. In fact, your pencil could be your higher power if you wanted it to be.

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Buddhism's the same thing. Every religion has stories like this. Mormonism does.

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Are we to somehow say that if you have these testimonies, that that validates the truth of something?

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Oh, yeah. Civilly so. Absolutely. Yeah, and you have to challenge the assumption.

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Really, you're not that bad. Let's talk about that. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, they somehow think that morality is based on some kind of a curve, you know.

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Yeah. Go preach

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Christ and him crucified for your sin. Yeah, in his particular case, before the cross, he's proclaiming,

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Christ set me free. Christ cast these demons out of me, and he gave me my sanity.

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He clothed me. I was able to sit at his feet, and he sent me to you to tell you what

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God has done for me. And you'll note, that guy was completely powerless to save himself, utterly powerless. I would argue that all of us would fail to defeat one demon in our own strength, let alone an entire legion of them.

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I mean, I was pointing out, if there was anybody bound, tormented by the devil, the devil wasn't about to let him go, it's that guy, you know.

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You always guard those things to make sure that no one's going to snap. Jesus shows up and, if demons could have wet themselves, they would have.

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You know, yeah. Okay, so,

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Scripture teaches us that every human being actually understands to some degree or another what good and evil is.

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We have the law of God written on our heart, but because of our fall into sin, that law is kind of marred.

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So we would point to something kind of universal within the experience of humanity. It doesn't matter where you travel the world.

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Minnesota, California, that's a totally different nation, by the way. Whether you travel to China, India, travel to Europe, there's laws that we all kind of universally have that are the same.

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That stealing is theft, and those who steal are punished. That murder is wrong and is punishable.

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And so, you're kind of working out from there. These are the things we all have in common. And where do we get this idea of right and wrong?

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And you'll note that it's assumed. It's assumed by us. If it wasn't assumed by us, the news would never make any sense.

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I mean, if we had to be instructed in the law and didn't know it intuitively, preaching the gospel would become almost like an impossible thing.

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But because we have the law written on our hearts, we can watch the news and we can hear that that murder took place, that that theft took place, that that politician stole this, that that church person did this terrible thing, and we're all scandalized by it.

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Oh, did you hear? And if the story's big enough, you bring it out to the water cooler at work.

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Did you hear what happened? Oh, what happened? Really, what happened? Well, I heard that there was, no, really?

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And it's like, and everybody, everyone knows it's awful, and nobody asks the question, how is it that we all know that that's awful?

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Okay, you don't have to be instructed in that. And even when our kids, when they're knee high to a grasshopper and they know they're disobeying you, they're looking first before they're gonna go do what they do because they know they're doing wrong.

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You don't have to teach your kids right and wrong in that sense. They already know that what they're doing is wrong.

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They have guilt, and so that conscience then is the law of God screaming at you, saying, you've blown it.

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You shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have said that, and this kind of thing. So it's always condemning you, and that's the voice of God through the law written on our hearts.

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Okay. Uh -huh.

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Yeah. Yeah. Right.

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Right. I think you're assuming too much as far as them not having a conscience.

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Remember the Shakespeare quote, thou doth protesteth too much. Okay. They may act like they have no conscience, but the vitriol with which they speak in order to defend those actions sound like self -justification to me.

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Right. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the phenomenon because we've talked about how the law of God is written on our heart, and I'm going to give you some

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Biblical text here so we can actually say that we've done some Bible study. Leviticus may be off the table at this point, though.

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We tried. Which you just...

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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, all right, coming back to this then.

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So Scripture describes then not only the increasing nature of sin. So sin is a corrupting force, and it's not your friend.

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It's not something that you can dabble with. It seeks to completely consume and devour you and take you over.

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And the more you engage in it, the more deeper you're going to go into it. And so Scripture talks about this then.

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So there's a corrupting aspect to sin, but there's another piece of this, and that is that people, in their unrighteousness, consciously suppress the truth.

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And then we're going to talk about a category that I'm still fleshing out.

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I have a little bit more time during the summer to do some reading, and so I've been reading

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Immanuel Kant and Jean -Jacques Rousseau. Why? Because I'm a glutton for punishment. But found something very fascinating.

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I like picking through the scene of the crime when it comes to the Age of Enlightenment and its detrimental, devastating impact on the

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Church. And so I like to go back to the original thinkers, Kant and Rousseau, and kind of work through that and look at other people and how they've commented and what these guys have done.

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And Rousseau had a very interesting category that he began the other philosophers after him built on, and we'll talk about that too.

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So that's where we're going to go today. But let me give you a biblical text, and then we'll take a look at our Old Testament reading from today, from Isaiah 65, because that'll help us as we frame the answer to your question, which is we're going to go a little deeper than we normally would.

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Okay? So here's what it says in Romans 1, 18. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness, they suppress the truth.

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So you'll note that sinful humanity, dead and trespasses, and sins, default mode is we're going to suppress the truth.

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So Josh noted that when you tell somebody what you're doing is wrong and they get really upset, they don't want you to speak it because that's the thing they're suppressing.

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But the fact that they're suppressing it presupposes that they know that what they're doing is wrong, and they don't want anyone to say it to let the cat out of the bag to remind them of what they already know is true.

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So human beings will suppress the truth, keep it down, and soundly punish those who would dare try to bring that back out.

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This is how human beings operate. And it says this. What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.

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So you don't have to prove that God exists. You don't have to prove what's right and wrong. Everybody already knows

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God exists and they already know what right and wrong is. For God's invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

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So they are without excuse. Although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and they exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals, and creeping things. So you'll note then that in their foolish hearts, the first commandment they're going to break is the first commandment.

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You have no other gods before me. You shall have no other gods. And they say, How dare you

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God tell me I can't have another God? I'm going to make my own God. And so they do. Because of this then, notice the therefore.

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I always find it fascinating when somebody says, Whenever you see in the biblical text the word therefore, you need to ask yourself what it's there for.

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That's not a bad way of thinking. So you'll note the therefore is there, particularly because this is now showing the corrupting nature of sin.

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So you're going to break the first commandment? Well, fine. So as a result of that, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

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Because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and they worshipped and they served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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Amen. So you'll note then, the consequence of idolatry now is that God's going to give you up to the lusts of your defiling passions.

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These are your sinful passions, and God's going to basically sell you into slavery to it. You're going to behave that way?

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Well, fine. You're not going to have any control even over your own bodies, your lusts, your urges, and your passions.

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And then for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

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And I want you to note here, this is describing homosexual passions.

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Not just behaviors, but the very lusts that go with it.

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And it's describing it as a punishment from God. I mean, think of it this way.

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Have you ever been so ignorant of how to do a project at home that somebody who actually knows how to swing a hammer and work a screwdriver and stuff like that has to give you instruction on it because you're just too stupid to know this yourself and too dumb to ask for help?

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Okay. It's happened to me frequently and regularly. Okay. This is why

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I know about this pain. Okay. Right. But see, the thing is that basically,

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God is basically saying, you're going to get so confused as a punishment for your rebellion against me,

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I'm going to make it that you look just stupid. I mean, with even your own body.

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Think of it this way. Homosexuality, if you were to compare it to plumbing, it's real simple. Those things don't hook up that way.

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Okay. This is just obvious. Right? But God has given them up as a punishment then.

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So as a result of this, women now exchange natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

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Men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.

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Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

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And then it gets worse. Watch where the list goes from here. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge

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God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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Here comes the list. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

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They're gossips, slanders. I mean, you're going to note here that with the start here, you got humanity made in the image of God.

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They refuse to worship God. God hands them over to sinful passions, sexual.

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It goes down to homosexuality and things get so bad, as they persist in that, that now they're all the way down here to gossip.

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That's how the list runs. And we sit there in our self -righteousness, we say, gossip isn't as bad as homosexuality.

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Have you read Romans 1? Have you read it? They're slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil.

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I've got a patent on my own version of evil. So every time somebody does that, I get money. Disobedient to parents, foolish.

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Pay attention to that one, Josh. Disobedient to parents, Fourth Commandment. Foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless, and though they know

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God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die. Note here, again, the

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Scripture is very clear. They already know that those who do these things deserve to die.

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You don't have to even convince them of this case, because we have the law written on our heart.

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Although they know that those people who do such things deserve to die, they not only practice them, they give approval to those who practice them.

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Hang on a second here. I don't know what happened. Could not connect to the

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Apple TV. Not sure what the error was, but we'll figure it out. Well, today there's a lot of movies that force you to cheer for the bad guy.

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Example, you know. Have y 'all ever watched that Hulu series, The Handmaid's Tale?

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It's bad. It is. Sharia with crosses? Huh? Sharia with crosses? Yeah, Sharia with crosses.

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They are describing Christianity as Islam. And, you know, it's like, you have no idea.

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Christianity is what pulls humanity out of the darkness, and you're accusing us of oppressing.

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This is just really fascinating. I mean, talk about backwards, upside down, inside out. And yet we watch.

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Oh, yeah, we do. And the reason why we watch, though, is it's still tapping into what

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I call the archetypes. All right? Now, coming back then.

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So why is that doing that? We can take your word for it.

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I'm not sure why it's... It's like it's hanging on to the connection and then letting go of the connection. Oh, no.

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Loko kaktov. Anyway. All right.

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So now coming back to this. And I promised we'd talk a little bit about something, and that is that when we look at our society right now, manifesting, you talked about homosexuality.

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I'll see your homosexuality and raise you one. All right? We now live in a day where people say, you get to choose your gender.

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This is nonsense. This is gobbledygook. Right? Now, what is that?

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I'm going to make an argument that this has something to do with our Old Testament text from Isaiah 65 today.

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Let's take a look at that, and then we'll build off of that theme and talk about the impact of Immanuel Kant.

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So in Isaiah chapter 65, we read this morning.

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Actually, Mark read this out for us today. Mark read this out, but let's review what he read out for us.

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The Lord is speaking, Yahweh. He says, I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me. I was ready to be pound by those who did not seek me.

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I said, here I am. Here I am to a nation that was not called by my name. I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices.

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You think of the book of Judges chapter 17. It describes the people of Israel at this time, that everyone did what they thought best within their own heart.

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Interesting. Now, in human history, with the rise of Christianity, it being legalized in the fourth century, and then through its growth and expansion during the

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Middle Ages, everybody assumed something. And there was an assumption that went along with the teaching of Christianity, was part of catechesis, and that is that everybody is to be subjected to the divine authorities, period, plural.

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The divine authorities being the monarch and the church. And you were not to oppose these authorities.

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Now, with the Protestant Reformation, now comes a rationalistic conundrum.

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So with the fracturing of the church during the time of the Reformation, you will have cities then that become identified with particular theological positions.

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So you have Rome representing Roman Catholicism, Geneva representing the Reformed Church, Wittenberg representing

36:44

Lutheranism, London representing the Church of England, which is kind of a weird mix. It's kind of like a mix between Catholicism, Reformed thinking, and Lutheranism.

36:54

Anglican, the Church of England's a weird cocktail. And now the question comes up, and here's the thing, is that at this time, church dogma was enforced, sometimes with the death penalty, if you deviated from it, by the government.

37:15

So if you live in Rome, and you're embracing and proclaiming the doctrines taught in Geneva, you would be put to death.

37:26

This was a capital crime. Geneva also put their share of heretics to death.

37:34

And then don't even get me started about the 30 Years War in Europe, all over religion. And then you think about the back and forth ping pong tennis match that occurred with the

37:45

British monarchies. One monarch is Protestant, that monarch dies, the person who takes that person's place is

37:53

Roman Catholic, and so it was a tennis match in the United Kingdom. Yeah, okay.

38:04

And so you have the government enforcing church dogma. By the way, that's called

38:10

Constantinian Christianity, where there's no separation between church and state. And now the question comes up to the average

38:17

Joe, person who's working a farm in France, and the question comes, who am

38:25

I supposed to believe? Which of these religions is true? And they sit there and go, if I was born in Rome, I'd be

38:35

Roman Catholic. If I was born in London, I'd be Church of England. If I was born in Wittenberg, I'd be

38:42

Lutheran. And so what I believe is just a matter of the role of the diocese to where I'm born.

38:53

Yeah. So we live in the United States, and what does our

39:00

Constitution grant us? Freedom of religion. The government shall not establish a religion and enforce it.

39:11

And right, that the government will not use compulsion to get you to believe one religious position over another.

39:20

This is up to, who is then the decider then as to what to believe here in the United States?

39:27

No. Huh? No, not

39:32

Trump. Yeah, oh Lord. Then he really is the Antichrist. Anyway. No, it's up to your conscience.

39:40

And so you'll note then that in the time of the Enlightenment, there's a really strong rationalistic reaction against authorities who were imposing dogma on their citizens, and they were recognizing that these dogmas were not being universally applied in Europe.

40:01

It depended on where you lived. And so part of the age of the Enlightenment is a reaction against it, but into the mix then comes

40:06

Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant is a Lutheran pietist. This guy is as dangerous as they get.

40:15

And I mean it. If you've read his Critique of Pure Reason, it's just devilish.

40:22

Kant and Rousseau together are the philosophers that have the most responsibility for the

40:29

French Revolution. And the reason why the American Revolution and the French Revolution are two completely different things in their accomplishments and the way they were prosecuted has to do with the different philosophers that were being read.

40:44

The leaders of the French Revolution were reading Kant and Rousseau. The leaders of the American Revolution were reading

40:49

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Totally different group of philosophers altogether.

40:56

One rationalistic and then Kant and Rousseau are really sowing the seeds of what would later become the

41:03

Counter -Enlightenment. They're very irrational in their way of thinking. But Kant writes against the concept, and this is kind of his core concept, and this will begin the meta -narrative of the

41:17

Counter -Enlightenment. He begins, he talks about and rails against the concept of tutelage.

41:25

It's a weird word. We don't use it. It's kind of an archaic term. But the idea here is that, let me give you like a modern day word that we would recognize.

41:34

Disciples, discipleship. So human beings always are in need of being instructed by somebody else who's farther along, who's studied and mastered a particular topic and then they tutel other people.

41:50

So that's tutelage. And Kant says none of that. None of that. The person, the only authority that you should recognize, according to Kant, to instruct you is not another human being.

42:05

The only instructor you should have is your own reason. Think about the implications about this.

42:16

So at the core of the Enlightenment, at its inception with its earliest philosophers and then the subsequent generations build off of this concept to where the next generation after Kant and Rousseau, they're talking about the need to embrace, and here's the word that they use, autonomy.

42:36

And we're not talking about the autonomy that we all know is good. The good kind is like this.

42:43

All right, your kids, they're in your house, they go to school, they get to a particular age, they go to college, you give them luggage and they take their stuff and they move out.

42:55

They eventually get married and they stay out. And they are now autonomous.

43:03

This is a good autonomy, right? No, no. Okay. The opposite of this would be the 40 -year -old living in his mother's basement, those are called boomerang kids, it's really a bad thing.

43:18

They are not autonomous. And I'm not talking about helping your kids out for a small period of time. So we're not talking about that kind of autonomy.

43:25

The way the Enlightenment philosophers are talking about autonomy is this, is that I am a law to myself, autos in Greek, self, namas, law.

43:36

These are not antinomians, they are autonomians. They are a law unto themself.

43:45

They recognize no authority higher than themselves.

44:02

You seem to put your finger on the self -contradictory aspect of all this because he was prolific in his writings of books and he's the one who taught people to think this way.

44:14

He tootled them in this. Yeah, right.

44:24

Yeah. So now, take this concept of autonomy for a second. Here in the

44:29

States, we have the Supreme Court. We all know that when legal cases work their way through the courts, if it makes it to the

44:36

Supreme Court, there is no higher court. In the autonomy that was put forward by the

44:45

Enlightenment, the autonomy of the Enlightenment says, you are the

44:51

Supreme Court. And now,

44:57

I want you to consider this for a second. A few years ago, within Evangelicalism and particularly in Lutheranism, there was a kerfuffle over the concept of antinomianism.

45:08

Now, antinomianism is a real problem. You want to see what an antinomian looks like, you look at the ELCA. But at the heart, the

45:14

ELCA is not antinomian. At the heart of it, the ELCA is autonomian. And the reason

45:20

I say this is because I've discovered in talking with people who are in the ELCA and others, that they are some of the most legalistic people on the planet.

45:30

And it doesn't make any sense to me because it seems so bizarre. And so, how do you make sense of something like that?

45:38

So, I'll give you an example. Years and years ago, when I was still trying to figure out the emergent church movement, which is, you know, somehow post -modern philosophy that has a

45:48

Christian veneer to it, I went and I went to different emergent events to get to know these people, to pick their brains, to make sense of this stuff.

45:57

So I got to know some of them. And back in the day, that was when I first put out, got on social media, on Facebook and Instagram and all these other things.

46:05

And I'm not a big Instagram guy, so those of you following me on Instagram, I'm sorry, it's collecting dust.

46:11

But I put out, I was at church and I decided

46:18

I would make a funny comment. Because at that time, the big megachurches were all the rage.

46:24

Everyone wanted to be a megachurch vision -casting leader. And people would make decisions about whether to go to this church or that church based upon whether or not they had a coffee bar.

46:33

And there was an article that was in, like, Relevant Magazine talking about the importance of having a coffee bar at your church.

46:41

And so I took a photograph of the coffee bar at our church. And it was a plastic table like this with a coffee pot like that.

46:48

And next to it was a thing of C &H sugar and some coffee creamer.

46:54

And so I said, here's the coffee bar at my church. Snapped it, put it up on social media, thinking this would be just hilarious, right?

47:01

No kidding. The emergence came out of the woodwork and they were all up in my business. And here's what

47:08

I was reamed for. You cannot have sugar from C &H.

47:17

That's sugar cane sugar. That's oppressive colonialism. You've got to get rid of that stuff.

47:24

And it's like, you know, and I mean, I had, there were tweets, there were comments, there was, ah, how dare you have colonial sugar.

47:38

These are the oppressors of indigenous peoples. And, you know, you have to have.

47:45

Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't free trade coffee. It was

47:50

Folgers or something, something great like that. Okay. Right.

47:58

So I've noticed then that they are utterly legalistic. It's just a different set of, different set of rules, which then asks the question, then what's the common denominator in all of this?

48:09

And this is where we have to pay attention, is that it's incorrect to say that the ELCA and these emergents are against the law of God.

48:19

They're not. They pick and choose those portions which they're going to subscribe to, and that's where you have to pay attention to the assumption.

48:28

Because here's how it works. I am the one who gets to decide.

48:35

I am the one who has the highest authority in the land for myself. There is no higher authority than me.

48:40

So I've decided that I'm going to believe this. I'm not going to believe that. I'm going to follow this. I'm going to follow that.

48:49

And what we do is we look at somebody's subscriptions, the things that they believe are true, and if a vast number of them fit into the category where somebody can be considered a conservative, we say, well, that's a conservative

49:03

Christian. And if the list is liberal, that person's a liberal. So we come over to this group over here.

49:08

They're conservative. We're in fellowship with you, and we like you. But here's the thing. That group and that group both have the same fundamental assumption that they are a law to themselves.

49:19

They do what's right in their own eyes. They're the ones making the decision. They're still the ones in authority.

49:26

Now come back to our gospel text. Exactly. Now come back to the gospel text.

49:34

Based on what we saw happen on the other side of the Sea of Galilee at the Gerasenes, who's really in charge?

49:41

Jesus. Alright? One of the things I say regularly is this isn't my church.

49:48

This isn't your church. The church belongs to Jesus. Remember what Jesus says in Matthew 28.

49:55

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. How does

50:03

Christ govern His church? Through His word. And what does

50:09

Jesus say in our gospel text from last week? If you keep in guard my word, you are truly my disciples.

50:18

He said to the unbelieving Jews, the reason why you do not hear the word of God is because you're not of God. At the end of the day, the person who is saying,

50:27

I've crafted my own patchwork quilt of Christianity. I subscribe to these doctrines.

50:32

I reject those ones. They are totally autonomous

50:37

They bought into the fundamental assumption of the age of enlightenment as taught by Rousseau.

50:45

They refuse to be toodled and discipled and under no circumstance will they endure the words, thus saith the

50:56

Lord. Mm -hmm.

51:13

Yeah. Right. Right. And so here, so now what happens is in these places then we gather together as a community of people who confess the fundamental doctrine.

51:29

You choose who you are, what you believe. You are an autonomous being and your reason and your rationality and your feelings dictate what is true, period.

51:42

And so if whatever's true for you, that's fine. This is what's true for me. Just don't tell me what to do and I won't tell you what to do.

51:50

We can get together and we can call ourselves Christians. You see it?

51:59

So the thing, the consistency within the inconsistency of the liberal soup of the

52:06

ELCA and other denominations, the thing that's universally consistent is that they are fully age of enlightenment autonomous organizations.

52:15

You can't tell me what to do or how does the movie quote go, you're not the boss of me!

52:22

Yeah, but do you think because of that they would want to study to actually open yourself up to have objective viewpoints?

52:42

Literally, that's kryptonite. They don't believe that. I was trained by the ELCA. I was a seminary student of the

52:49

ELCA. That's not God's word. The parts that I agree with might be.

52:56

And so that's right. This is a distinction that comes up then. So the philosophers who buy into this, they become seminary profs.

53:07

And they teach the small group of men who would become the pastors, they toodle them in not being toodled, which is really interesting.

53:17

And they come back and here's what happens then. The whole age of enlightenment project is we've got to get to the bottom of who the historical

53:25

Jesus is because the guy who's described in this book, that can't possibly be the historical Jesus.

53:32

Based upon, well, I've determined this because I'm me. Yeah. Right.

53:51

So as a result of it now, so here's what happens in the ELCA. The Church of Autonomians.

54:00

If you were born and your birth certificate says that you're a male and you want to be a female or you want to be a ze, a me, a blah, whatever pronoun you want to pick for yourself, they will affirm you in that because their core assumption is you are autonomous.

54:27

It's utter lawlessness. Yep. Now I want you to consider then what we confessed this morning.

54:58

I believe in God the Father Almighty. The maker of heaven and earth. Or the

55:04

Nicene Creed. I believe in one God. When you confess that you believe in one

55:09

God, that confession demands a complete bending of the knee to the notion of autonomy and a repentance from the concept.

55:19

To be a creature who has a God who has created you means there is nothing autonomous about you.

55:28

And what is Jesus? He is King of Kings. He is Lord of Lords. All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Him.

55:34

And by the way, He calls the shots not only in His church, but in the whole world. Even the demons have to ask

55:41

Him for permission. And Jesus says to the church, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

55:47

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching all that I have commanded. End of story, full stop.

55:53

There's nothing that we get to teach in Christ's church that isn't what He's commanded, that doesn't have His word.

55:58

Where do I find these things that Jesus taught and commanded? The only place I know of to go is the word of God.

56:04

And that's what Jesus calls the Old Testament Scriptures. And that's what Peter calls the writings of even

56:10

Paul. My apologies.

56:38

I have no idea how you reconcile what you said here that homosexual temptation, homosexual feelings are themselves a condemnation for your current data pedagogy.

56:50

I can't reconcile. I've occasionally heard you mention 1 Corinthians 6, 9 -11, and that's fine.

56:56

But I can't reconcile what you said with what

57:02

God teaches to put my seed of doctrine inside the homilogomena, 1 Corinthians 10 -13.

57:08

And then in the antilogomena, Hebrews chapter 4, the final paragraph in Hebrews chapter 4, verses and numbers memorized.

57:18

And I can't see how you're not aggregating. You've got the law to the homosexual community really good.

57:26

I never hear you offer the comfort of the gospel specifically like that. You'll bash them, but you won't evangelize to them.

57:33

Okay. I'm going to just take what you said at face value. I'm going to take what you said at face value, and I'll say this.

57:41

That being the case, then I have done a disservice to those who are suffering from those temptations.

57:50

And for that, I'm sorry. Because I fully agree with what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6.

57:56

Let me pull that up as our starting point, and then we'll work back through 10 -13. 1

58:02

Corinthians 6. The Apostle Paul makes this very clear that regarding these types of sins, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

58:13

And I want you to look at the list and how complete it is. Neither the sexually immoral.

58:20

And this is a broad category. This is as broad as the guy who surfs onto a porn website, who visits the local sex shop, to indulges in weird perversities that only he understands.

58:36

Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor the adulterers.

58:42

And this is the reason why on Friday when we premiered a video where we talked about autonomism,

58:49

I took on adultery rather than homosexuality. Because I'll be blunt. The church is rife with adulterers.

58:57

And we barely say a word about it. And this is not right. Nor men who practice homosexuality.

59:04

You know and I know the Greek behind that. It's not as it lays out in the English. It's a little more explicit.

59:11

Nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

59:17

But here's the good news. But such were some of you. Such were.

59:24

But you were washed. You were sanctified. You were made holy. You were justified in the name of the

59:30

Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God. And so I would say this, is that every single human being, regardless of the manifestation of sin in their life, whether it is a proclivity towards thieving, gossiping, slandering, coveting, homosexuality, adultery, sexual immorality, it does not matter.

59:53

Our identity is not wrapped up in those things. And there is forgiveness and mercy for everyone.

01:00:00

And I would even go just a little bit farther. That fellow, that demoniac of the Gerasenes, it doesn't get any farther gone than that.

01:00:10

And we are not privy to the sins that led up to him being in that state.

01:00:15

If he can be saved by Christ, then maybe, just maybe, there's hope for me.

01:00:26

Because here's the thing, that list, that nails us all. I don't know anybody who says, well, there's nothing on that list that I've ever done.

01:00:39

You have your finger up. Okay? I acknowledge that finger. Far from it.

01:01:40

He admitted, he put that in a very fine, eloquent way, but it came out as a doctrine.

01:01:52

It's not how I took it. That's all a good step in the right way to give this, and ask for help to do so.

01:02:28

I will say this. I do make a point, and I cannot say that I always stick the landing.

01:02:36

I do not pull any punches, and I preach the law. I don't preach the law to make you feel better about yourself, or even make you feel like you can obtain it.

01:02:45

The law nails me, just like it nails everybody else. If in my handling of the topic of homosexuality, and I would note this, is that oftentimes,

01:02:56

I do not handle it from the pulpit. I handle it here in the Sunday school. In the

01:03:01

Sunday school, when we're dealing with a topic, I'm not approaching it in a law and gospel way.

01:03:08

It's possible, absolutely possible, that I can discuss sins without at the end, bringing us back to the gospel.

01:03:16

I think that would be a deficiency then in my teaching that I should reconsider. Mr. Rose.

01:03:23

How can you say that we should cure them of their homosexuality?

01:03:51

We're going to break up the marriage. God doesn't like that. Kids aren't going to have parents.

01:04:07

Because we have all these sins. It's a straw man argument.

01:04:17

It's a straw man argument because the church has no authority to preach anything other than what

01:04:23

God's Word says. And it's not about curing anybody of anything. I'm going to basically say this.

01:04:29

I have no belief whatsoever that preaching God's Word right is going to cure you of sin.

01:04:36

That's going to come through your death and your ultimate resurrection. Christ is working that.

01:04:41

That is mortifying you through His Word. But that's not a cure.

01:04:47

The cure comes at the resurrection. The cure comes with the death of this body, if you would. Only then will you be free from this body of death.

01:04:56

So instead, the proper category is we preach the law to convict people of their sin.

01:05:02

We preach the gospel to comfort them and assure them that Christ has bled and died for their sins. And then the call of the gospel is to repent.

01:05:09

And it's a daily call. Repentance is not a flu shot. It's a daily experience. One where we are daily repenting of our sins.

01:05:17

And so for the homosexual who has decided that they're going to completely do this to God and they go and they get married to somebody of the same sex and now they've adopted children, there is going to be complications in their repentance that they're going to have to work out.

01:05:37

And the reality of the situation is, and what I'm going to say is going to sound really harsh, keeping that couple together and depriving those children of a mother and a father and giving them either two mommies or two daddies is going to have a serious detrimental impact on them.

01:05:56

Serious. And the stories coming out from children who've grown up with homosexual parents, it's frightening.

01:06:07

It ain't pretty. And so real repentance requires them to acknowledge their sin, to repent of it and bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

01:06:17

And that is going to be messy and that's for them and God to walk out.

01:06:25

Now conversely though, I would say this, that biblical Christianity does not have a hard and fast rule against polygamy, which is a strange thing.

01:06:35

You can't be a church leader and have multiple wives, but if you have somebody who's converted from Islam and their wives have converted, that's a strange beast altogether.

01:06:50

That might be a different outcome, but I'm not sure what repentance looks like in that situation. And then we've got to wrap up here.

01:07:08

There's an interesting experience. The funny thing is that what they look to authoritatively is not

01:07:18

Scripture, obviously, but they actually never state that it's themselves that's the authority.

01:07:25

They look to some institution that upholds their personal belief. Right, it becomes a kind of form of bias, confirmation bias.

01:07:38

But ultimately, it's still that they are their own authority. Now, I don't want to do you a disservice.

01:07:44

I wanted to read out 1 Corinthians 10, 13. No temptation has overcome you that is not common to man.

01:07:51

God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it.

01:07:59

And so we're going to note this, that God permits us to not only be tempted, and tempted in many different ways, but also

01:08:08

Christ does provide the way of escape. That being the case, if I were tempted to steal

01:08:15

Don's iPhone, because it's such a great iPhone, still that temptation,

01:08:22

I have to recognize that the temptation is to sin. The temptation is to break

01:08:27

God's law. And so as Christians then, we come back to this text and we see in it that even in the midst of temptation to a sin to which we don't feel any power to say no to it, that's not true.

01:08:46

Christ has promised that He is going to give us strength and that we need to seek Him in resisting those temptations.

01:08:55

Right. I agree with what you just said. I can't reconcile it with what you had said about it.

01:09:03

I still don't know how to reconcile what you said about Romans 4. The temptation has proved you.

01:09:10

So now here, I see where the issue is. Let me make sure I understand it properly.

01:09:17

So then as a Christian, so in the list, we've got homosexuality, sexual immorality, whatever.

01:09:26

So then as a Christian, am I saying that now that I'm in Christ, I won't have these temptations?

01:09:39

Yeah, yeah. No. It's even softer than how you put it out there. No, the point

01:09:46

I was making is that these passions themselves and being sold to them, therefore

01:09:54

God has delivered them over to this, that that is a judgment of God.

01:10:00

Now this is where the distinction is. As Christians, we are not under the dominion of darkness. That does not mean we're not tempted in these ways.

01:10:07

And so there is a fundamental distinction then between the impenitent and the believer that is working in my assumptions.

01:10:16

The person who is sold out to these things, this is absolutely the judgment of God and Romans says that.

01:10:24

But that's only the beginning of his discourse. The discourse finishes in three where Paul basically says, are you

01:10:31

Jews any better off? All have sinned. All have fallen short of the glory of God. And so taking this part though, for the unbeliever, they are truly sold under the dominion of darkness.

01:10:44

They are sold by God to these defiling passions and they only get worse. End of story.

01:10:51

This is most certainly true. But on the other, conversely sin, as a believer then, should

01:10:56

I expect that I won't be tempted in these ways? No. I will be tempted in these ways and my own sinful flesh is going to go, it's going to go, can we please do that thing we really like to do?

01:11:09

No. Alright. There's this difference between a temptation that comes up as a result of my sinful nature and being sold under it as a judgment of God.

01:11:19

And that's where the distinction lies. Does that help? Okay. No. No.

01:11:29

No. Jesus was tempted. Yeah. Yeah.

01:11:35

No. He was tempted in every way yet was without sin. Okay. So it's not the temptation, it's the passion itself being sold under it that God gives.

01:11:45

I do specifically evangelize that community. Yeah. That's one of my big missions in life.

01:11:53

Yeah. And I need to be able to, I regularly am offering 1

01:11:58

Corinthians 13 and Hebrews 4 that you have a great high priest, I don't care what you've been tempted by, you can go to him and he'll have compassion.

01:12:08

You don't have to deal with Jesus' gag reflex. And I would just be careful in that because if you're talking to an unbeliever, it's not a matter of what they've been tempted by, it's what they're guilty of.

01:12:20

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I do make a distinction then between the believer and the unbeliever.

01:12:26

Okay. All right. Very good. Went a little long today. I blame

01:12:32

Dwayne. Good job, Dwayne. All right.