Apologetics Session 2 - What is Faith? - Part 2

Father, we come together today, we come under your glory, your salvation, Lord, the blessed.

Gift you've given us, by your grace.

We thank you, Lord, for these wonderful men who are here. They came here for a purpose, and I hope we fulfill that purpose in honoring you, Lord. Things we're going to talk about today are, in some ways, are controversial.

In some ways, they divide people.

But they're truth, and they're truth from your law, from your word.

I pray, Lord, that our discussions here will be godly, will be open, will be honest. And these are important things that we have to talk about now, as we see how the world.

Is starting to collide.

So, Father, I pray that you would just open our hearts and our minds as we do this, as we learn together, and fill our hearts with love and compassion for each other.

We ask this in your name, in Jesus' name, amen.

Apologetics as a Defense of the Christian Faith

So, last week, I felt like I was a pitcher, just pitching things at you, and they were very, very heavy concepts that were coming there. But I wanted to try to get you to start thinking certain things that are happening right now.

And I asked some provocative questions for us to think about.

And I got some feedback, which was actually really, really good.

Some of the provocative questions I was asking was, one is, can you have faith and not know.

The enemy, or know evil?

Can you have faith? Number two is, and this stirred up a little bit of banter, was, if the church is practicing paganism, people who are going to the church, do we consider them believers or not? It wasn't a statement of saying that they weren't believers or not, but what do we consider them to be if they go to a church?

Because the church is a community of believers that is supposed to feed either milk or meat to the congregation, and build up the body of Christ. So, that was another question that I had raised out there.

And I thought...

That's what it shouldn't be.

What?

That's what it should be, right, right, right.

And so, what I started going down the path was, and trying to understand how what we call faith, and what the church is calling faith, and what people actually think is faith. So, and I brought an example last time of that over 65 of the people in the US right now believe they're Christians.

They believe they're Christians.

So, this is one of two things about all of this. One is that Christianity is an umbrella for all types of religions now. If you just name God, it seems like it falls under this umbrella, you know. Two is Christians is a name that's a brand, or a style, a lifestyle, or what have you.

And probably number three, which is probably the worst thing is, is that 65%, a lot of those people are going to go to hell, and they do not know their Lord and Savior, which.

Is a horrific, horrific thing.

So, trying to peel that onion is difficult for people, because they don't understand that the dynamics are happening within the country itself, within the church itself, within the body of Christ, right, that's happening right now.

We are very, very blessed in this church, with the elders and deacons, and with John and Jeff, how they're pushing forward the truth of our Lord and Savior. And that is something that is being cemented into the souls of us every, every day.

And we thank God every day that that's what they're tasked there. But we need to understand the genesis of what's going on here, so we can have an idea, because this is one thing you're going to find out very quickly.

The people you're going to be talking about apologetics about are not people that are unsafe. You're going to be talking apologetics to people who claim they are safe, and they call themselves Christians, you know.

And, you know, you always, you know, the axiom, give them a little bit of knowledge, and they.

Think they know everything.

That's what you're going to run into. I've had more debates with fellow believers about the sovereignty of God compared to what they call, you know, universalism or what have you. So that's going to be the majority of the apologetics you're going to be dealing with, is really defending what you believe and why you believe it.

Tribal Spiritualism, Paganism, and the Rise of Cultural Christianity

Okay, so one of the big questions that came up, and I loved it, was this whole idea about race and about, you know, white churches, black churches, you know, what's all that.

Stuff like that.

And that's a debate that has been going on for the last 50 years in church when I was in school. That was like a major theme, and now we see it across the board with the woke or the CRT.

Movement or whatever we want to call it.

But, again, we want to go back where the Genesis is happening and how paganism works and why is it happening now, what's happening now. So what I have here, what I did very unskillfully here, is really what the paradigm is.

And it's a rather simple paradigm, and once you know it, you can actually go to almost any church and check it out. It's not something that's very, very hard, you know. So tribal spiritualism, let's review it again, is really using past or current cultural relevance and then turning your message to align with whatever that's going to be.

And they've created a religious norm or polarizing what God's divine laws are about,.

Okay.

And it's not overt. The thing is, is that it's never overt. It's sleight of hand. That's the way Satan does it. It's always a sleight of hand. You're looking, you're nodding your head, and blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden.

It's like, what?

And before you know it, you're going down a different path. Oftentimes they use scripture to bend God's word. That's what Satan does all the time. He never goes, you know, the Bible says he's a liar. Yes, he's a liar, but he's more of a bender than a liar.

The liar, we're smart enough to really figure out what a liar is. But Satan bends the rules, bends scripture to go ahead and do what his agenda is. And the result is, you know, moral truths are culturally defined within the church,.

Okay.

And that's a phenomenon that's happening all over. I just read a couple days ago that this particular problem is in over 95 of the churches in the U .S. right now.

Right now.

This is a huge, huge problem. So, you know, what's pushing all this? Why is this all happening? And why does it seem like for us that it's like it's happening now? Well, this has been around for since Abraham's days.

Go ahead.

Could you just define paganism for us, just to jump back up to your title there, paganism?

Anything that moves away from God's truth. Anything that moves away from God's scripture. Anything that's used as a religious premise that makes you little God compared to God.

That's paganism.

Okay.

And it's hard for people to accept that. We're being, right now, people like myself, everybody who's here, we're going to be looked at as the troublemakers, the agitators, because we're calling it what it really is.

All right. This has a long, long history from early in Moloch and Baal, all the way through through Egypt, all the way through, through the judges when, during the time of the Bible with, when we had the kings, even to Jerusalem with the Pharisees, the Holy Church, all the different things, even Nazism and Zionism.

All that's paganism.

Okay.

So, understand that Satan's greatest job is divide and conquer. Makes it very, very slice and dice to confuse everybody to figure out what's, what's going.

On here.

But if you put this in a huge umbrella, all that goes underneath that, you can understand what's going on and you can have a better direction of what God wants you to do. So, it is paganism. There's no doubt about paganism.

Okay.

And so, oh, I'm sorry. Let me see if I can get this down here. Oh, I'm sorry, guys.

Oh, okay.

So, the driver is ethical nihilism. And basically, this is the engine that makes this work for them.

All right.

It denies really moral principles or godly principles or biblical principles or scriptural.

Principles.

It denies it. Doesn't deny it outright.

It bends it.

Okay.

Human beings are not seen as responsible for what they do, which is totally against what.

Scripture says.

We're in a fallen state.

We live in a fallen state.

So, they don't see themselves as that.

Okay.

There's always a cause and effect for why they do what they do.

Hence, we have the woke movement.

We have the church of the abortion, church of pro-choice, church of social justice, church, all these churches go underneath here driven by this. And they take no onus of it because what's happening there is the experiences outside the church that's driving this.

And it's really darkness, evil, Satan, whatever you want to call it. And so, the result that happens with these two paradigms is this religious speciism. Speciism, just in general, is that anything that looks over at anything else and looks down on it means it's less than.

And once it's less than, you can do whatever you want to do with it.

Perfect example is Nazism.

Nazis are the edge of Jews. Jews weren't human.

You can do whatever you want with Jews.

Same thing with ISIS. Same thing, you know, with all different types of terrorist groups. So, you know, the religious speciism part of this is a big deal. So, if you and I leave Cornerstone, we're visiting another church and we're walking into that church.

Okay.

And if the church is somewhat friendly, they're going to ask you, where are you from?

Yeah, I said I'm from Cornerstone.

What do they believe?

Well, we believe in Reformed theology.

We believe in, you know, the Trinity. We believe that, you know, Jesus Christ died on the cross, rose up on the third day. You know, this is what we believe in.

Yeah.

What else do you believe in?

The Bible is the interim order of God, isn't it?

Yeah.

But what they do is they begin to add on to it all these things because the construct that's just called out needs to have some appendages to it that has some cultural relevance. So, if you believe that, then you must believe in social justice.

If you believe that, you must believe in racism. You believe that, and those connected dots is what, how they build up the body. You'll be able to see it once you know this type of paradigm.

Okay.

So, religious speciism, now we will get separated out. And there's usually two groups. Less-Thans are us.

We're the Less-Thans.

And that's very obvious.

You know, we're the ones that are unloving, judgmental, you know, Reformed. You know, we listen to that guy Calvin. You know, it's like, what's going on there? And, you know, we really believe every single word in Scripture, you know.

That's a problem. We're a Less-Than.

Okay.

And the other group, which is the group that's part of the 65%, is the Nones. They're not affiliated with really anything. They don't have, they believe in a higher authority, but they don't know what that higher authority is.

And it usually splits off to New Age Lost, which a lot of people are involved in that, or Universalism, where, you know, God is big, huge, and we're all involved in that, and.

God is love, and all that.

So we're breaking that. And then here is the latest thing, and this is really important to know now, because in the next two to three months, you're going to learn about this. Christian Nationalist, okay.

Christian Nationalist is the enemy of Tribal Spiritualism, because we believe that our country was built on godly principles. And because our country was built on godly principles, we are being basically name-called and pigeon-holed and categorized into this whole different type of thinking because of the godly principles that our country is built on.

Not that our forefathers were all Christians, but they did believe in godly principles to.

Build a country.

So they kind of squeezed this on there, and we'll get into that in a minute. But before we do all this, does anybody have any questions about this? Does this make sense to you? Does anybody have any questions?

Or is this...

Not specifically about what's there. Maybe I'm...

Of what?

Apologetics. Apologetics.

Oh, yeah, you're right. Apologetics is, okay, it's a logical defense of the Christian faith. Apologetics is a branch of Christianity.

It's a science.

It defends the authority of God's word. The character of God, the Christianity as a whole, also uses the Bible as an offensive.

Weapon to do that.

And I'm going to be sending you all this. I actually sent it to both of you, but everybody's going to get the whole thing there, all right? We use it as a sword, as a weapon, against all worldviews and opposition.

And it's really about preparing the believer to become a warrior for Christ. There's no more... We've lost time for pew potatoes. They actually have to stand up now, because they will be at our doorstep any second.

You're seeing it right now in Canada. So did anybody have any questions on that, what I had just had up there? Because what I'm going to go to next is really look at biblical axioms. So the reason why this happens is, who's...

Has anybody heard of Augustine? Oh, Augustine.

Augustine, or Augustine, Augustine, okay.

So he...

Oh, Hippo.

Hippo, right. He was really the first apologist, okay? And he was really trying to figure out where the genesis of this comes out of, in terms of what our belief system is going to be. And so he had three reasons for existence, all right?

Number one is, I am eternal. The second reason is, I am self-created. And the third reason is, I am created by someone or something greater. For us, this is God, and we are made in his image. So these are the three premises that he developed, which is really the spark that formed the Reformation later on.

Because this happened right around 410 AD, when he came up with this. I am internal, which really doesn't have a relevance there, because saying I am internal, humans don't have the capability of knowing anything that's not finite.

So it's very hard for someone to say, I am internal, although this is one of the clear messages that Satan does. He's trying to convince you that somehow you are a little god, and you are internal. Which in truth, you really are.

Souls go through heaven or hell.

Right, heaven or hell. Or I am self-created, okay? And this premise goes underneath here, where I am self-created. And that means that I am God. So I am God, little god, little g. And then the third premise, of course, is what we have here.

So all three of these things have a certain context about how we go ahead and grow in what we believe, in our faith, and what is happening there. And I won't delve too much more than this, but one of the things I want to talk about is the causality.

When we accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as our savior, one of the peaceful premises we have is causality versus irrationality. And causality is that once we grab a hold of this and understand it intellectually, and we have it in our mind, it's easy for us to have peace that God is in our lives, that he controls all things.

And we have that peace because, you know, the causal framework of a fallen world, and God's glory and grace is over that, gives us the peace and assurance, right? Irrationality can't give an answer like that.

So when we look at causality of things, are we surprised at what's happening in the world right now?

Yeah.

It was foretold.

How?

What we read in the scripture was told by the prophets. We knew it from Isaiah. We knew all those things.

Yeah.

Do you see this as part of the prophetic falling away of the church?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

It's this sifting that's happening right now in the church,.

And it's moving away.

And please, you know, please, we need to talk this through. Ask questions as I'm going through this. So when we accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior, we have this causality, there's this peace of mind that we know that we don't have to feel like we have to control everything.

God's in control of everything. Even when everything is happening, people don't have that assurance, all right? Everything becomes irrational for them. They can't put a finite ending to what is going on there because it's a spiritual war that we're in.

And the only way they can try to figure out how to move through this is because they want to be like God to control what other events are happening. They come up with irrational propositions that don't make sense.

Hence, the church of whatever it's going to be that's happening over here, okay? So as believers, we balance this. We balance it back and forth. We don't, we do it almost every day. And it also affects our faith.

Some days we're saying, oh man, we're so close to the Lord. And some days we're like, what's going on there? And it's because in our own finite mind, we're trying to rationalize what all the things that are happening around us.

And so the wax and wane in our faith is based on that balancing act between causality and irrationality. Does that make sense? That's, that's, it happens a lot, all right? And it's, it's good to know this when you're talking to somebody else who claims to be a believer and it's missing that part.

It's a missing ingredient, you know? So know this. Our Lord will always glorify himself.

Always.

And it's throughout scripture, okay? Second thing is our Lord will allow evil to dwell to show his power to all. You know, in Exodus 9, 16 says, but for this purpose I have raised you up to show you my power so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.

In Exodus. That's number two.

Number three is, and this is, unfortunately, it is a fact of life. Our Lord uses our human ineptitude to expand his reach in our beliefs to show his holiness with the result of lifting our faith. So it's an interesting paradigm.

He doesn't use our strength. He uses our weakness to lift our faith. Last week I had mentioned it very briefly, but the truism is this. In our walk with the Lord, we're either leaning towards Christ.

Or we're moving away from Christ.

There's no middle ground. You're either going this way or you're going this way, okay? And, and with our fallen nature and, and just because of our sin nature,.

We're never going to be perfect.

And God uses that to raise us up.

He's always going to use us to raise us up.

And there's a reason for this because the Lord created us in his image.

And to have a relationship with him.

So the things that we have that are finite, we do have the attributes of God for that purpose of leaning towards him and our relationship with him. And that's very important to what was happening here because the relationship that people are having here, I'm sorry, it's not going to, but what, what's happening here is that people are having more allegiance to the cause than having allegiance to what God can do.

And actually limiting God's power by the causes than trusting God to overcome everything. And that's a big, big, big problem.

All right.

So, you know, we're made in God's image and in Genesis 1, 26, he says, he says that, he says, let's make, let's make man. Let's make man in our image after our likeness. I let him have dominion over the fish, the sea, you know, the story of the birds and heavens, livestock, blah, blah, blah.

Okay.

In Genesis 1, 26. So the image of God is not a quality.

Okay.

So understand this, which is part of the causality. It is a status. It's not quality. It's a status. He made us. It doesn't matter if you believe him or not. He made us like that.

Okay.

So it's binding in that belief. It's a binding promise that he made all, he made all in his image, regardless if you believe in him or not.

That's how he made us like that.

Okay.

So it's distinct from all other creation. And we are his visible. Those are in Christ. We are his visible representation. So that's why this whole thing is so dangerous of what we're talking about.

Okay.

Later on, we're, we'll talk about election or free will. And I don't know how we're going to toss it around. We may have to play that among us three, but that goes, that goes back and forth. But, but one note to this, there's no such thing as just free will.

There's no, no such thing alone in salvation.

Okay.

Salvation is, is not man-centered. It's rather God-centered. And if someone's claiming to you that you have free will, then what they're basically saying is, is that I control over God, my salvation.

That's not how it works.

That's not, that's not grace.

Okay.

God will give, not give glory to any man's decision. God will not yield his glory to anyone or anything. But specifically with respect to salvation, God states in both the Old and New Testament, I, even I, he who blots out your transgressions for his own sake, Isaiah 43, 35, and your sins have been forgiven on account of his name, 1 John 2, 12.

So it's not a, the way we look at it in the English language, what free will's about in terms of like, I'm just going to decide, whatever.

It doesn't happen that way.

Those chosen simply respond to the free gift of grace, faith, and repentance, not by their will, but by his will. Again, salvation is all of God, none of man. As soon as you put part of man into the salvation process, you've lost what, what salvation is about.

It's really, really important that we understand that. It is a total gift from God.

It's his grace.

Okay.

Simply put, okay, and this goes back to the original premise that I was talking about, about race, about ethnics and nationalities there. So race plays no part in salvation. And in the church or in our relation with God, race is a made-up term.

It really is a made-up term.

Okay.

So let's talk about race real quick.

So race, the way we look at race now, well, actually, before I even go there, do you think there are black churches? Do you think there's just white churches around? And if you think that, do you think that's biblically correct?

Man-made ones.

Man-made ones.

There are clearly churches whose congregates are, it's okay to talk about it. Homogenous.

Yeah, yeah, right. So when we're looking at that paradigm, okay, and we're looking for the community of Christ and what that umbrella is of what God made us in his image,.

You know, one blood, one God, all right.

Is it right for the church?

To separate on color or race?

Is it right?

Is it a responsibility of pastors? I'm not going to weigh in there. These are things you need to think about. Is it a responsibility of the church or the pastor, the elders or the deacons to go out to the communities and go ahead?

And to your term, homogenous, you know. And these are very, very deep, deep questions that really need to be wrestled with. Because it's affecting the way Christendom is right now. And actually, people are not coming to Christ because of this.

It's a very bad problem. If we go with the belief that salvation has color tense to it, okay, we're under, what's athema, you know what I mean? It's really a curse. And churches who project that, and again, it goes back to that whole thing with tribal spiritualism, that the cultural premise is that we're going to be the church of a black church or church of a white church or whatever church that, it's not really a church under God's name.

That's not a church.

That's a country club.

So do you feel that there's black churches that if a Caucasian wants to walk in, they'd be asked to leave?

No, I think there probably is cases of that. I think a Bible-believing, scripturally sound church doesn't turn away, first of all, they don't see in color, and they don't turn away anybody in the church.

Church is a spiritual hospital that needs to have people come in there. So I don't see that. If that does happen, that's the responsibility of the leadership of the church to go change that. And not only do they have to answer to leadership, they also have to answer to God for it.

So there's no room, especially now, to have that happen. That's why the whole conversation with CRT and WOKE and everything is so blasphemous for what God's law and God's word and his truth is about. It is absolutely blasphemous.

And to have different organizations that kind of look over the theocracy of the church, making a position on that is so heretical and so anti-human, anti-believer. It's something that you can't tolerate.

That's why Jeff's at war right now with Allama, because he's basically saying the same thing. You cannot be neutral on this. You cannot have both feet, one here and one here. It cannot happen.

All right.

Even with our church, not that we're open to anyone, but I've seen a lot of black people come into the church in the past couple years and they don't stay.

Yeah, it's our responsibility.

Are we not welcoming them?

And I think a lot of it's fear-based. I think a lot of it is just not knowing. And again, this is not a new phenomenon.

It happened, you know.

This has happened for hundreds of years. But it's our responsibility as believers in Christ that our brothers and sisters are in that same family. And if you can't accept that, then there's something very wrong in what your belief system is.

I mean, you have to accept it. It's not a question of like, yes or no. You know, this is a church and it needs to be that way. And then everything else that happens that comes with it, you know, you have to work through it.

You know, Jeff had mentioned we had this one side conversation and I just asked him, you know, what do you think the biggest fear you have right now? And his biggest fear was, and he was very forthright about it, he says, I'm afraid of thieves in wolf's clothing.

Or wolves in sheep's clothing, I should say.

Yeah, that coming into the church and disrupting the church and undergirding it, you know, to make it go wherever it's gonna go. But if we start here and we start that this church is a loving, compassionate church open to all no matter what, you know, there's no way that can happen because sooner or later, and it's been my experience, sooner or later, they will be found out.

They will be found out.

And there's enough love and compassion in this church to lovingly push people out of the church. That we'll try to do that. But make no mistake, there's gonna be people coming to this church.

That are gonna try to undermine it.

They won't.

It's just the way it is in terms of our fallen state, you know. So without exception, we were all born of one blood.

The Church, Race, and the Difference Between Welcoming and Compromise

Yeah, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, not so much a black and white thing, but I will say that in the church that I came from years ago that I was there, they started to tell, when they started to move away from the Bible, they started to say that we needed to be more welcoming.

We'd hear these buzzwords,.

We need to be more welcoming,.

To the point where they allowed all of this non-biblical stuff in, in the guides of being welcoming.

Correct.

And I'm not saying, it wasn't a black and white thing. We welcome anybody, any color. It's all about the Bible and whether they're Christian and they're following the word. So we didn't see it that way, but it was like, they actually went to the point where they went to gay pride parades and in Philadelphia and actually had a booth there.

And they thought they would try to recruit people to the church by saying, we apologize on this booth for being biblical. Please come to our church in Moorestown. We, you know, we welcome you. And you have to be, when you take wolves in sheep's clothing,.

They'll say, well,.

You're just not welcoming enough. And so, and you talk about bending, how the devil will bend. They want you to bend a little, like, okay, well, we have to follow that part of the Bible. Can we, can we go a little bit more away?

We don't want people to feel like they're not a Christian, that they're not good enough. So we want to have a, we want to be a big tent. We want to be a very big tent. So, and what happens is you let the leaven in, it ruins the whole loaf.

So you have to be very careful. And when I hear words like welcoming, you don't want to welcome to the point where you're distorting the word.

And, and the precedent,.

Thanks for saying that.

We have a lot of precedent to look at,.

Especially in scripture.

And God was very clear, especially in the Old Testament, of having the Israelites not mix because of that specific reason of not mixing with other nations or other tribes or anything. Not because there was hatred or anything.

It's like, this is a slippery slope. You start here. And, and one axiom is very, very true. Heretical teaching never happens from the big starting point. It always happens two to three generations later in the church.