Canada’s Official Rejection of Christ’s Claims: Bill C4

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:58

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. Thank you for investing your time.

01:03

I know for me, time these days is extremely precious, and so if you're listening to us or watching us, that is a vote of confidence in us.

01:14

I thank you very much for doing that today. For the first hour of the program, we are going to be talking with Dr.

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Joseph Boot, who is the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto, Canada, and he is the president of the

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Ezra Institute, and I am very honored to be a fellow of the

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Institute. We are going to have Dr. Boot on to talk to us concerning what is going on in Canada, an upcoming event on the 16th of January that will be directly related to that, and hopefully get a little information about a book of his that I read.

01:57

Oh, wow, this thing may have been last summer now, but I haven't been able to get hold of the printed copy yet, so maybe he'll have some news for us on that.

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Rich, are we ready to roll over there? All right, let's ask Dr. Boot to join us.

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Greetings, sir. You're doing the dark, scholarly background thing again.

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It makes you look really, I don't know. I don't know what it makes you look like, but it's sort of scary.

02:28

I like that dark, foreboding sort of mystical look behind me when I'm doing these things.

02:34

Yes, yes. Well, you got it going. Well, it's Canada, so you're not going to see the sun up there again until, like,

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May anyways. It's true enough. Well, it's a little dark here in Phoenix today.

02:48

We're actually going to have some storms all the way through the holidays and stuff. We're happy about that.

02:54

The sunshine can get much after a while, but anyways, we have so much to be talking about, and I wish, honestly, that we could have you on to talk about more upbeat things and enjoyable things, but we're all called to a certain time.

03:12

I'm not sure that if Jeremiah had done podcasts in his day, that many of them would have been super upbeat at that particular junction in Israelite history, but we're all called to a certain time, and we serve faithfully there.

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You've already done, I've noticed, and I listened to you were on a national program and talked about this with Ali just a few days ago, but you've been doing a lot of describing for us poor

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Americans who don't understand how these things work, what is going on in Canada in regards to Bill C -4, which

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I guess last year was C -6. Am I right about that? Yes. Okay, so you guys have odd numbers and things like that, but this was a bill that had died last year, and then this year was reintroduced and stunningly was passed unanimously.

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I don't think almost anything, honestly, could be passed unanimously in the

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United States Senate and House of Representatives. I can't see anything like that ever happening.

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But this was. Let's go back a little bit and please explain to us what

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C -6 was and what C -4 is, and is this now law?

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And if so, when does it take effect? Well, thanks ever so much,

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James, for having me on the show. It's always good to spend time with you and get to talk to you. And yes,

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I wish sometimes it could be under circumstances that were less concerning, less foreboding.

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Basically, Bill C -6, which was the first incarnation of this particular bill, essentially was purported to be an anti -conversion therapy bill.

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And what comes up in people's minds when they hear conversion therapy, at least of late, is the notion of people getting electric shocks in some basement somewhere to try and rid themselves of same -sex attraction, feelings of same -sex attraction or whatever.

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And so it was ostensibly targeted at sort of draconian, coercive or violent practices.

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The difficulty is there's absolutely no evidence in Canada or the UK, or as far as I'm aware, many major Western democracies today, of those kind of practices going on.

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That's certainly never been uncovered in Canada. I've certainly never seen any kind of expose of some sort of coercive so -called conversion therapy.

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The term itself is a misnomer. We'll come to that in a moment. So C -6 was actually this year.

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It was the first incarnation of the bill. And then what happened just after the summer was

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Parliament went into, well, it had its summer break, as I should say.

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And if you can't get a bill through the House and the Senate before the break, the bill falls.

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Everything falls that was in the previous sitting of Parliament. And those bills that the government deems priorities for its agenda, for its government, are reintroduced then at the next sitting of Parliament.

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So in the fall, when the politicians came back after their break, the bill had a new number, hence

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C -4. Unfortunately, the bill actually got worse when they reintroduced it.

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So in its first incarnation, the bill was proposing to ban any service, any practice, any treatment that was seeking to make somebody more comfortable with their own biological identity, their own sex, or their own gender expression, as the language goes, their own gender identity and gender expression.

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That if you were to counsel or help somebody who was asking for it with gender dysphoria, basically, or unwanted same -sex attraction, or you were to advertise or promote help for somebody, counselling, so any treatment, any service, any practice that sought to address the problem of gender dysphoria or of unwanted same -sex attraction, then this bill,

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C -6, wanted to outlaw that for minors, so for those under the age of 18, that it would be basically illegal to advertise or promote or practice that as conversion therapy.

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The problem in the first draft, because 62

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MPs voted against the bill C -6 because of the definition of conversion therapy being so vague that you could drive a freight train through it, and so there was opposition to the first bill.

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The bizarre thing here is that when this bill came back, as Bill C -4, not only had the definition of conversion therapy not changed, because it is a non -definition, there is no real definition in the bill,

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I've actually got the bill here, and the definition of conversion therapy means a practice, treatment, or service designed to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual, change a person's gender identity to cisgender, change a person's gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth, repress or reduce non -heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour, and repress a person's non -cisgender gender identity, or repress or reduce a person's gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.

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So you need a PhD in queer theory just to understand the definition, but there is no real definition of conversion therapy there.

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And when Bill C -4 came back, almost identical, it was worsened insofar as at least with Bill C -6, if you were a consenting adult and you were seeking counselling, you were seeking therapy, you were seeking treatment for unwanted same -sex attraction or gender dysphoria, struggling with your sense of self, struggling with being comfortable as the male or female you were born as biologically, as an adult, even though it would still be illegal to advertise that service to somebody, so that it would be very difficult for any adult to find that kind of help, you could still get it.

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Bill C -4 outright bans even adults receiving any form of counselling, any form of treatment, any form of therapy that would seek to conform them to God's norm for human sexual behaviour, or the basic male -female distinction.

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And perhaps as we go on with this discussion, I can clarify one or two other things in this bill, but that's the basics of it, and the bill threatens five years in prison for those practicing conversion therapy, and two years, up to two years in prison for anybody who dares to promote or advertise it.

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Now, okay, so do you have any theories whatsoever as to what happened between the two bills that would explain the amazing reality?

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Because I think you may have posted, other people posted video from Parliament when

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C -4 was passed, and it was passed unanimously. How does, what happened?

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Who brought that, who has the power to bring that kind of pressure to bear on a legislative body?

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Well, that was certainly what I think did shock even people here in Canada, Christians here in Canada, was the speed through which it was accelerated, the accelerated process, and the fact that we went from 62

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MPs voting against it to zero. And it was the

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Conservative Party, supposedly the Queen's opposition, that actually proposed the fast tracking of the bill through the

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House without any kind of review, without any kind of, I've got it here,

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I'm asking today, said the justice critic for the Conservative Party, for unanimous consent from the

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House to adopt the following motion, that notwithstanding any standing order or usual practices of the

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House, Bill C -4, an act to amend the criminal code, conversion therapy, be deemed to have been read a second time and referred to a committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported without amendment, deemed concurred in at the report stage, and deemed read a third time and passed.

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This is unheard of. That meant it went straight to the upper house, which is the

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Canadian Senate. And exactly the same thing happened. Conservatives railroaded it through the

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Senate, so that basically within a few days after the Senate passing it, it had in Canada, where it requires basically the formal process of royal assent, which it had within a few days, and it will become law in early

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January, January the 8th, this enters onto the, becomes part of the

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Canadian criminal code, so that any pastor who would dare to counsel a church member, or a child of a church member, or a new person who's just come to faith in Christ, who's struggling with same -sex attraction, and counsel them, and this should be discovered, would be exposed to the possibility of criminal penalties of imprisonment.

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So we know that, we know that, for example, there are trials going on in some of the

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Scandinavian countries, scattered across Europe as well, where there have been people in Germany and other places that years ago wrote books, well, similar to books

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I've written, the same -sex controversy, and maybe not even as explicit as that, that are now being brought up on charges, are being tried in courts of law, and this has now come to Canada as well, and yet it happened without a single voice.

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Is there no one in the House and Senate in Canada that has any idea of the rights that used to be sort of assumed within Western culture and in Canada as well?

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Well, I think that, to answer the first part of the question, it's a bit of a mystery as to why nobody stood up.

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We know that there are committed Christian MPs who have since expressed regret that they didn't.

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I don't think it's any excuse. It's astonishing. This is evidence of a fascistic mindset. It was practically like we were a one -party state.

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And this is the worst, most totalitarian piece of legislation ever passed in this country.

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It violates the fundamental charter rights of Canadians because, of course, this doesn't apply to…

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If somebody is wanting to practice homosexuality or transition, have a sex change, if such a thing were possible, if they want to go through the process of hormone therapy and surgery and all of that and have counseling and so forth, that's all fine.

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That's not covered, and that's explicit in the bill. If you want to move in that direction, that's fine, but it's not the other way.

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So basically, you've got a whole segment of the Canadian public here who are being legally, with the heaviest hammer at the disposal of the government, the criminal code, are being told that their right to seek help over their own sense of identity or their own sexual practices, if they want to move in the direction of a normative understanding, an orthodox, historically

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Christian understanding, that's not legal. The other way is perfectly legal. So I think that the only explanation for what happened, and frankly, the cowardice of the

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MPs who, on conscience, opposed this previously, is massive political pressure.

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There's huge political pressure within the Conservative Party itself.

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There is a strong cadre of homosexual activists, of people who are driven by this progressive agenda.

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It is not a small group. They're very influential. They're very powerful. I think tremendous pressure was being applied internally, and the thought was the

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Conservatives are going to show how progressive they are and try and win over the Canadian public by getting out in front of the

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Liberals, by getting out in front of the NDP, who are even more progressive, if it's even possible, than the

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Liberals themselves, will get out in front of them as Conservatives, and we will fast -track this bill through.

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It reminds me of what happened in England when the former British Prime Minister David Cameron got up and said, when he was advancing the legalisation as a

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Conservative of so -called gay marriage in England, he got up and he said, I'm not doing this in spite of being a

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Conservative. I'm doing it because I am a Conservative, because marriage is a good thing, therefore we're going to promote marriage, even though we've totally destroyed it and redefined it now.

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So it's that sort of a twisted, perverse mentality that somehow they were going to get the kudos, they were going to get out in front of this for the

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Canadian public and show how wonderfully progressive the Conservatives are by being out -progressing the

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Liberals. I don't know whether you saw the footage that I posted, but they were crossing the floor and hugging and kissing one another.

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There was a standing ovation when the most totalitarian bill ever to pass the floor of the

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Canadian House was passed unanimously. They were crossing the floor and hugging one another, and the applause went on for several minutes.

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This is supposedly a free democracy. People are being denied their fundamental freedoms and our politicians are applauding it.

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Obviously, this did not happen overnight. Obviously, this has been developing for generations, literally, in the

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West as the foundational beliefs that gave rise to our freedoms and to our economic advancement and the founding of institutions.

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All of these things that we know were based upon fundamental

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Christian concepts of who is man, what is law. So much of what made our freedoms so lasting was the fact that they were based upon biblical truths concerning the nature of man.

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But it really seems, especially after World War II, that there was a very deep -seated shift taking place.

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It's happened more slowly down here. I'm starting to wonder if temperature has anything to do with it. I mean, you think about it.

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You guys are in the frozen north all the time and you look at the United States and where is the great resistance?

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It's in the south where it's still going to be like 70 degrees here today, even though it's cloudy and stuff like that.

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And we want to pretend that it's winter, but it's 70 degrees. What do you do? So maybe it has something to do with temperature.

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I don't know. But we know that Canada has been moving ahead of us along those ways.

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We have our sections. We have our northern sections that move right along with that same thing.

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But still, this has been going on for a long time. And now what we've been warning, we've been told, a slippery slope, fallacy, et cetera, et cetera.

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It's not a slippery slope. It leads directly into the sewage pond at the bottom of the hill.

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And we're there. We just plopped right into it. And we know that the

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Canadian courts are a very, very, very, very, very slim hope for any relief from any of this.

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You want to comment on that real quickly? Yeah, there will probably be a constitutional challenge to this eventually.

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But as I've said before on this, I don't hold out much hope for the courts upholding the charter on this.

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When the question of Trinity Western University, a Christian university in Western Canada, recently went all the way to the

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Supreme Court for their right to have a law school. And they were challenged in this right because of the lifestyle document of their

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Christian college that required adherence while studying at the university to a

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Christian sexual ethic. It was deemed that their religious freedoms guaranteed by the charter were trumped by the modern conception of non -discrimination, of equality, and human dignity.

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And it's very important to recognize that those two words, and they're actually used in the preamble, which

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I'll read to you in just a second, which is very short, but it's very, very important because it answers your point about the change.

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I don't have hope that the courts will overturn this.

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They'll have just watched the entire House of Commons and the entire Senate unanimously vote for this.

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No court's going to be in the mood to strike that down just because some

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Christians think that it's an infringement upon their civil liberties. Canada, I mean, it's not the weather because Canada in the 19th century had a tremendous claim to being a thoroughly

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Christian culture. What we've seen, as you mentioned, especially since World War II, is the steady abandonment of the

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Christian faith at the foundation of our social order. And we've gone in 50 years, James, the end of the 1960s, when homosexuality, the practice of homosexuality was still a criminal offence.

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In 50 years since that was repealed at the end of the 1960s, in 50 years we've basically gone from sodomy being considered a criminal offence to so much as counselling, writing, advertising, promoting or suggesting that somebody should conform themselves to the gender of their birth.

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Not even should. Somebody who wants to conform themselves to the gender of their birth has no right to pursue that.

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And that anybody who would counsel anyone to move away from a homosexual lifestyle is going to suffer criminal penalties.

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That's in 50 years. You've gone from acts of sodomy being regarded as criminal to any form of resistance, because you've got it in the speech codes as well, the hate speech legislation and the hate speech codes, that even speech against this can expose you to charges of hate crimes.

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And now any form of positive action to help somebody who's seeking it to conform themselves to a

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Christian view of identity and sexuality is a crime. 50 years. So this rapid abandonment of the faith after World War II is now seeing a precipitous slide in our fundamental freedoms.

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And this won't be the only fundamental freedom, obviously. We try to warn people that once religious freedom is gone, all other personal freedoms are going to be going right along with it.

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But no one seems to want to look at history or think logically or rationally at this particular point in time.

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So, all right, you're pastoring in Toronto. You're probably wishing that someone might discover that a slight error was made on the drawing of the map and that mile or so into Canada would plop you into somewhere in northern

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United States. So I'm not sure that's going to help a lot these days in our own situation. So what do you do now?

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I mean, obviously, there are already entire denominations in Canada that would never dare to say anything negative about homosexuality or the transgender movement or anything like that to begin with.

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They're affirming, they're on board, and probably celebrated all of this,

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I would assume, in some way or another. But for the faithful in Canada, knowing that I think you said the 8th of January, is that when it becomes effective?

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Around there, I believe, yeah. Knowing that the government is now literally saying to the church that these are prohibited subjects, and yet you and I knowing that if you're going to honestly work through the holiness code in Leviticus 18 and 20, if you're going to honestly deal with the nature of what took place in Genesis 18 and 19, if you're going to walk through Romans 1, if you're going to recognize that the

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Apostle Paul was walking through the moral law, the second table of the law in 1

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Timothy chapter 1 with Timothy and included homosexuality, and especially the key text, 1

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Corinthians chapter 6, verses 9 through 11, where the church itself is told, such were some of you, but you were cleansed, you were justified, and all these things.

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So what is the believing church in Canada to do at this particular point in time in light of the governmental action?

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Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that some churches will have welcomed this, and of course, you're right.

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The liberal progressives have welcomed this. They've been promoting these bans themselves.

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And in fact, there were already regions, local regions, local municipalities that had their own bylaws that they'd already introduced around these issues and around conversion therapy to the point,

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James, where even a couple of years ago, I was being asked by some churches in western provinces when

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I was going to speak there at conferences, to see my notes in advance about what

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I was going to say. In fact, we also had Nancy Piercy up to join me at a conference, and in the western context, she was asked to send copies of her notes and PowerPoints in advance.

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Churches worried about falling afoul of local bylaws. And yet still, people didn't really take this threat seriously.

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And the only response that we can have to this as Christians and as a church is, of course, overt resistance and disobedience to this bill.

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It's a thoroughly religious bill. And those who follow this ridiculous mantra of bring politics into the pulpit and so on, look, the state, because we've ecclesiasticized the

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Bible for so long and said it's only a church book, and we thought that we would be allowed it there, the state has just reached right into the church and told the pastor what they can and cannot biblically counsel in their own churches.

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They've said it with regard even to the family. Parents can go to prison for subjecting their child to counseling, even of any service, any therapy, any kind of counsel that would fall afoul of this law and its jurisdiction.

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And by the way, they're covering their bases, because the law says that if a family were to travel outside of Canada, let's say a family went down to the

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United States on a vacation for a month. And while they were there, went to see a pastor there to help their son or daughter with some of their challenges in this area, that would be a criminal offense as well.

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But it's a thoroughly religious bill, and this is why we must respond religiously. This is what the preamble says,

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James. Whereas conversion therapy causes harm to society because, among other things, get this, it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.

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And whereas in the light of those harms, it's important to discourage and denounce the provision of conversion therapy in order to protect the human dignity and equality of Canadians.

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And with equality there, read the destruction of all distinctions.

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That's what equality now means for the secular humanists, for the modern pagan. Equality is the destruction of every distinction, including the male -female distinction.

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And human dignity, of course, means radical autonomy. But the government has just drafted basically a religious piece of legislation that says the

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Bible is a myth, the teaching of Jesus and of the apostles is a myth, and anybody who tries to steer somebody in the direction of what the

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Word of God says is subject to criminal penalties. So the only thing that we can do as God's people is respond by saying we are going to commit ourselves to the preaching of the whole counsel of God, to a biblical view of human identity and human sexuality, to pray for people along this line, and to faithfully discharge our duties as pastors and elders with those who come to us asking for help.

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That's the only thing pastors can do if they're in Canada, if they're going to be obedient to God.

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And so to that end, we are trying to stir up a campaign, if you like, a public campaign here among pastors and leaders in Canada to commit themselves to doing that.

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Because the bill passes into law around January 8th, we've selected

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January 16th to be Biblical Sexuality Sermon Sunday, and we're hoping that this will become an annual thing that Canadian and perhaps

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American pastors in solidarity with us would commit themselves to preaching that Sunday every year, not that they're limited to that, but at least on that Sunday every year, to reaffirming

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God's design for marriage, God's design for human sexuality, the Bible's teaching on our identity as male and female, and guiding people and praying for people in those terms and committing ourselves as the church.

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And we're doing this in light of the earlier public campaign we had around the

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Niagara Declaration in Canada, which myself, with the help of a few others, drafted over a year ago now, which committed to 10 articles, several whereas statements, and then 10 articles, of which about four of those articles, if you go and look at the

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Niagara Declaration online, are now being breached by the Canadian government.

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And several hundred churches in Canada already committed themselves to the Niagara Declaration, and we're hoping that all of them, and many more, will now commit themselves to faithfully preaching in their churches on biblical sexuality on basically the second

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Sunday in January every year on the anniversary of the passage of this bill.

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Well, I might have some connection. I know, I think normally the third Sunday in January is in the

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United States. You run into the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which was a really weird time of year, but it was because how it was argued.

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Anyway, there is a connection between the two. People don't want to talk about it. They don't want to talk about the reality of the goodness of God's law regarding human sexuality would really have a great impact on this subject of abortion if that was even considered any longer in Western culture.

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But so, and it was funny when I was inviting Dr. Boot to be on the program,

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I said, I also want to talk about 1 -16. And he wrote back and said, what's 1 -16?

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And it took me a second to go, oh yeah, we're the weirdos here. Everywhere else in the world,

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January 16th is 16 -1, not 1 -16, but we're

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Americans, and so we do things weird and figure everybody else should do things in a strange way as well. But obviously, certainly,

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I've spoken with the elders at my church, and we definitely want to be involved with that.

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We're going to make sure everybody knows about January 16th. And we want to stand with, obviously, we want to stand with our

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Canadian brothers in what they're facing with this tyrannical absurdity of a travesty of justice.

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But we're facing, look, the people in charge in our country want to do the exact same thing.

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It just seems like you have a party that has a name up there which doesn't connect with anything in the party itself.

36:29

We still have a few conservatives left in the United States, and I can't imagine anything like this going through unopposed.

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I am concerned with the way things are going that it would eventually find, what's down here is called the

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Equality Act, would have similar impact in the United States as C4 has up there, or at least would make it possible for those types of things to happen.

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Obviously, our Bill of Rights is a little harder to get around than what you have in Canada, so we are thankful for that barrier, as small as it may be, at this particular point in time.

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But I would encourage everyone, is there a link from the Ezra Institute?

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Because I saw a webpage for January 16th. Yeah, we're doing this through the

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Liberty Coalition Canada. What we can do,

37:29

James, is make sure you've got that link for anybody who's interested so that you can post it with the show. But I think right now it should be up on the website.

37:41

The Liberty Coalition Canada was formed in January this year by a group of us pastors.

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We gathered at the Ezra Institute, met together about 40 of us and said, what can we do?

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And to recognize that there was a need for a public advocacy group to really start to act and speak on behalf of Christians more effectively in Canada.

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So that's why the Liberty Coalition Canada was formed. They're leading the charge on promoting the 16th.

38:15

We can send that information so that you've got a link. I think the interesting thing is that when you talk about the situation in the

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United States, Karl Marx couldn't have believed, this is beyond his wildest dreams, of a radical egalitarian order where distinctions have been destroyed.

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He, of course, famously Marx and Engels said that the key to the holy family is the earthly family. And to get rid of the former, the latter must be destroyed in theory and in practice.

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Well, this is the most radical destruction of the family, of the normative understanding of the family that you can imagine.

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And it's incredible to think that in a country like Canada, the heirs of Marx, people like Judith Butler, who wrote that famous book,

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Gender Trouble, she's the Jewish American lesbian thinker, who basically said, you know, sex is fictive.

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Sex is not a real condition. You're not born female, you become female, or you can be neither male nor female, because sex is a creation of the language regimes that we use.

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And that's the essence, she said, of politics. Politics is a language regime. It's about the words you use and repeat.

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And those words, that regime that you adopt, then shapes your perception of the body and of society.

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And so this is a radical continuation of the sexual revolution. That's all it is. There is no social revolution without sexual revolution.

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And this is an attempt to continue with the sexual revolution, the social revolution through sexual revolution.

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And that's why it is a major threat to the United States. We wouldn't have imagined it possible here. But we've seen in the

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US in the last couple of years, the extent to which a Marxist ideology is infiltrated, especially the

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Democratic Party, and the various Marxist movements like BLM, Antifa, and others.

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You've got these radical attempts in the US to queer the curriculum. We've had that for years in Canada, this slow queer theory being pushed through the curriculum, so that all children are being educated in this.

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We've got other bills, James, sitting now waiting at the provincial and the federal level to enforce more of this education in the schools.

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And so this is just the thin end of the wedge as well, if you can believe that. They're determined to push through the radicality of this.

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I think the next threat will be to the charitable status of churches and organizations that don't bend to this agenda.

40:53

And so it is a warning to the states. I totally agree with you, there's far more resistance there. I think you're a good way from this yet.

41:02

And we've been hamstrung by this awful Canadian charter that was drafted by Trudeau Sr.

41:08

in, or is his brainchild anyway, in 1982. Before that, we had the British North America Act.

41:14

And it seemed that the unwritten constitution was much more reliable than this written charter that we have here in Canada.

41:23

And your Bill of Rights is certainly more substantive. But we can't rest on our laurels. In America, absolutely cannot rest on the laurels and think that couldn't happen in the states, because this agenda is being pumped so thoroughly through the institutions of culture today, that it doesn't take long before they've captured an entire generation.

41:42

They certainly have. By the way, for those looking for it, Liberty Coalition Canada, oneword .com

41:48

slash biblical -sexuality -sermon -sunday is where you can go to get information on Biblical Sexuality Sermon Sunday.

41:59

My prediction is you'll have progressive churches going the opposite direction and promoting their unbiblical perspectives.

42:12

So my hope is, look, I was slightly ahead of the curve on this, only because of my dear friend

42:22

Jeff Neal, who back around the turn of the millennium, did a series of studies in his own church on the subject of homosexuality.

42:33

I'll be honest with you, even though that was only 21 years ago, that was pretty unheard of in our circles.

42:40

I certainly was raised within a context where you just didn't discuss this stuff. What had happened was a fellow that he and I had known in college came out as a homosexual and was in fact chaplain for the

42:56

Arizona Senate or House of Representatives or something like that. And we were invited to do a debate with this guy and another homosexual on a local

43:05

Christian radio station, and we did together. And that resulted in,

43:11

I was already writing for Bethany House Publishers, the acquisitions editor said, you know, we really need fresh material on this.

43:18

There's not much written on this. And that's what led to Jeff and I writing the same -sex controversy.

43:24

And obviously the biblical material hasn't changed in 21 years, but oh my goodness, the flood of material that has come out since then is just absolutely astonishing.

43:34

But my generation, and I'm older than you are, as is well obvious to anyone watching the television screen right now, my generation was embarrassed to speak about these things.

43:48

And I think a lot of people grew up in my generation, not knowing that there was such a thing as a biblical doctrine of homosexuality.

43:58

You just imbibed what that was supposed to be sort of from hushed conversations in the hallways or with your parents.

44:06

But the idea that there was a vibrant and clear and across the whole canon of scripture view of mankind created by God in a particular fashion, the goodness of God's law regarding these things, that just wasn't a part of my upbringing.

44:27

So we were way behind when this stuff started.

44:33

And we've been playing catch up ever since then. My hope is that when people do, if they say, yes, we need to stand with our brothers in Canada, that you won't just simply get, well, these are six passages that talk about homosexuality type thing.

44:49

It's so much broader than that. We can't ignore those. We need to know the revisionism. And I was looking at the website and it looks like on the last,

44:59

I haven't caught up. I'm so far behind. I'm dealing with Molinism right now. It takes forever. But I haven't caught up with the last podcast, but it looks like you were dealing with 1

45:09

Corinthians 6 and the such were some of you materials that are there.

45:15

These are vitally important texts that our people do need to understand. And I hope you won't be overly surprised to discover that I have definitely preached on these subjects many times.

45:28

And certainly at Apologia, our people know what the key texts are and how they relate to the entirety of God's law and things like that, because Jeff and I are very much focused upon aspects of those things.

45:42

Jeff being another of the fellows at the Ezra Institute. And Piandra Sandal, who was down there when you were there.

45:49

And we're all deeply implicated in this craziness of believing

45:55

God's law and it's good for humankind. It's been created by God. But I really hope that the sermons will be full of allowing

46:07

Jesus to speak in Matthew chapter 19, because look, you are risking it to do these things up there.

46:15

We're not risking much right now to do this. Oh yeah, this stuff could be used against us sometime in the future.

46:20

Fine. There's already so much of evidence that that we're doing one way or the other. It doesn't matter. But you're obviously risking directly.

46:29

You're one of the leaders in this. You're risking arrest and prosecution for doing these things.

46:36

So if we're going to do it, we need to do it in such a way that when the evidence is presented in the trial, it needs to be a glorious proclamation of Jesus's lordship over all of human life, including how

46:53

He made us in this way. And the onus needs to be placed, the burden needs to be placed upon these judges.

47:00

They need to know that if they're going to enforce this law, they're going to stand before the one who uttered the words of Matthew chapter 19, and they are going to answer for their rebellion against Him.

47:15

That needs to be made clear to these societies that are deciding that they are going to institutionalize rebellion against God's truth.

47:25

Those judges need to know. Act 1731 tells us that God has appointed a day when

47:31

He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed, and He's given proof to all people of this by raising him from the dead.

47:38

The resurrection has given us proof of this. So every judge needs to know they are standing in the light of the empty tomb, and the one who came out of that tomb said these words.

47:51

And you're telling me that you're going to throw me in the for five years for repeating what the resurrected

47:57

Lord said? Do you know what you're doing, what this is going to mean to you in judgment before God?

48:04

I think we need to be clear. They need to, if we're going to have a prophetic voice, we need to say to these people,

48:12

I have eternal life. I have been made right by the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

48:19

But if you stand before Him in rebellion without having repented of your sins, and this is sinful to do this, you are going to answer for these things.

48:29

We have to be open in telling people that there is a result of standing against God's truth.

48:36

Yeah. And I mean, with this law, James, it's so ambiguous at this point, deliberately so,

48:42

I believe, that it's unclear whether preaching a series of sermons on biblical sexuality, never mind counseling somebody on repeat occasions, whether that repetition of sermons, a sermon series, would constitute the promotion of conversion therapy.

49:00

It's simply not clear. And this will end up being one way or another tested in the courts.

49:08

You know, those people who think this won't, they won't come after the churches.

49:14

Well, they thought that before the pandemic, and then we have pastors in prison for holding services.

49:21

So, you know, we can't buy any of that. I'm so glad that you said this isn't just about the mining of or preaching on throwing out a few texts about sexuality.

49:33

It really is this whole, it's a cosmology. It's the whole worldview that needs to be dealt with.

49:39

And as you said, you know, your generation, and to some extent mine, we're not grounded in a full or worldview, the cosmology of the

49:51

Bible, understanding that the very idea of distinction, of differentiation is rooted in the being of God, that this issue strikes at the very heart of God's own being as father and son, the self -revelation of God, covenantally to us is familial.

50:08

And the distinction that exists in the Godhead between father, son, and Holy Spirit, that's what constitutes

50:13

God's transcendence, his distinction. And this attempt to destroy the most fundamental creational distinction that God makes between male and female, as God's image bearer, is actually an attempt to strike out directly against God.

50:31

As our friend and another Institute fellow, Dr. Peter Jones, has pointed out many times that homosexuality is the sacrament of monism.

50:42

It's oneist, it's a pagan, it's a symbol of a pagan ideology.

50:48

Whereas marriage is a sign of actually the triune

50:54

God's self -revelation, his covenantal relationship with human beings, and speaks even of the distinctions that exist within God's being.

51:04

And of course, the Bible begins with a wedding. The relationship of God to his people,

51:13

Israel is described in the covenantal terms of a marriage, and Israel is an adulterous people.

51:21

Christ comes to us, of course, through the Holy Family, and he is the son.

51:28

So this attempt to destroy as we've done in Canadian law, the very idea of mother and father and replacing it with parents.

51:37

You know, in Canada, now in Ontario, you can actually enter into a contract with four completely unrelated people to be the parents of a child who's not even yet been born.

51:48

This is a root and branch attempt to destroy the family. And then

51:53

Christ's first miracle as he enters public ministry is at a wedding. And then the relationship between Christ and his people, his church is described as that of a bride to a bridegroom.

52:05

And then history ends in the marriage supper of the lamb. So when people say, well, it's not a gospel issue, don't worry about it too much.

52:12

You're over it's just politicized. This is at the very heart of the gospel. This is at the heart of the biblical cosmology of the biblical world and life view.

52:21

This is the this this goes strikes at the root of what it means to be in relationship with God for us to be the bride of Christ.

52:29

If these distinctions break down, the very covenantal name of God, as father becomes meaningless and the relationship of Christ to his people is destroyed.

52:40

How do you describe God as your father? How do you explain God as father and the church as the people of God as the bride of Christ to a generation that has had decimated in front of them the very idea of male and female, mother and father, and of marriage.

52:58

The gospel gets gutted of its core elements by this assault, which is what it is.

53:07

This is fundamentally and so this has got nothing to do with health. It's got absolutely nothing to do with concerns about coercive practices.

53:15

This is about striking at the root of God's self -revelation. There's no question about it.

53:21

And that's why I hope that the sermons will be very much focused on a positive presentation of a holistic

53:29

Christian understanding of God as creator, God having the authority to define all of these things.

53:36

We are his creatures. We will only find true fulfillment in ourselves when we see ourselves as God defines us to be.

53:45

All these things are just, they have been robbed from the younger generation.

53:51

They've been taken from them, resulting in a non -transcendent, ugly, chaotic world that is ruled by the autonomous wills of man.

54:04

It's a recipe for disaster. So I hope that across Canada and then here across the

54:11

United States and, boy, the same thing needs to be going on in Australia, in the

54:16

United Kingdom, in Scotland for crying out loud. It's like my

54:24

Scottish forebears are trying to outrun their own history. It really seems, honest, it really does, that my

54:35

Scottish forebears are embarrassed by the depth of their ancestors' commitment to the

54:41

Christian worldview and are trying to do everything they can to wipe it out. And, of course, all across Europe, I would invite everyone to stand with our

54:49

Canadian brothers. If I am not providentially hindered,

54:55

I have already asked to preach that sermon at Apologia, and hopefully

55:01

I'll be able to do that. There might be something that gets in the way, we'll see, but hopefully

55:06

I'll be able to do so. If I can't, I'm sure that Brother Jeff will do a fine job in so doing, but we will definitely be joining with you in that.

55:15

Now, I wanted to let you get to dinner tonight, so I wanted to quickly ask you to tell us a little bit about what the situation is.

55:29

You sent me a book to read sometime last late summer, was it?

55:34

Somewhere around there, and I even asked permission to send it off to a mutual friend of ours,

55:44

John Cooper of Skillet, and he said it absolutely rocked his world. He said it was one of the best books he ever read.

55:51

Of course, I also gave him that little Mission of God book too, so I've sort of been,

55:58

I'm guilty of Joe -bootizing Skillet. Made me a good friend there, and I appreciate it.

56:05

Well, I'm awful glad about that. John's a great guy. So I've written an endorsement,

56:11

John's written an endorsement. Parts of it have come out, but as I understand it, the whole book isn't out yet.

56:17

Am I right about that? What's the situation? Yeah, so to clear up the confusion, basically you were sent a pre -release

56:25

PDF before the final typesetting was happening.

56:31

The issue is that it's being released, the book is called Ruler of Kings, Toward a Christian Vision of Government, and the book is actually being published by a

56:42

British publisher in London, Wilberforce Publications. Now in Canada, what we did is we decided that we would also release the content in the form of three monographs called

57:00

For Government, For Politics, and For the Kingdom of God, so that they're more bite -size in three parts.

57:06

The book will not be a very lengthy book. The book will be about 200 and maybe 25 pages.

57:13

It's not a massive book. It's not Mission of God. It's not a 700 -page thing to clobber people with, but because it's a

57:23

British publisher and they had a release schedule, they had hoped that it would be

57:30

December release, which is what I'd originally said to you, and that's been pushed back to probably mid to late

57:36

January. I sincerely apologize for the delay on this and want to assure everyone that Ruler of Kings is coming,

57:48

Wilberforce Publications, and it should, although don't absolutely hold me to it, it should be with us by the end of January.

57:57

You'll be able to be shipping from up there and we'll be able to get hold of it here in the

58:03

States and start passing it out like candy, right? I certainly hope so, yes. We'll be printing our own up here as soon as it's been released, and so it won't be an expensive thing to ship it from Europe.

58:14

You'll be able to get it from us, absolutely, and we'll have it available as soon as is humanly possible.

58:20

The three parts of the book deal at the beginning with basically the whole question of secularism, what is secularism, the myth of neutrality, and deals with the very idea of authority, the root of authority.

58:38

It then moves on to a discussion of the way in which liberal democracy has come to express itself now in this much more technocratic vein, in the utopian political ideologies that now dominate the political landscape.

58:54

Then it finishes with an attempt to really outline the Christian response, the meaning of sphere sovereignty, and how we need to build a distinctly

59:04

Christian political vision. It's the first book where I've really tried to focus on the issue of politics and of government, and I'm certainly very hopeful that people will find it useful in this cultural moment that we're in.

59:20

I obviously appreciate it very much, your endorsement, James and John Cooper.

59:27

Yes. Well, obviously, the most memorable part for me, there was much that was memorable.

59:34

You started addressing some of the issues that other people have been directing me toward, transhumanism and what's going on in those areas, things like that.

59:43

But on the biblical issue was the discussion of the need to differentiate between the kingdom of God and church so that people can have an understanding of how that needs to work and how

01:00:00

God's kingdom is being expressed and some of the objections that people have made.

01:00:06

The other thing was the length of it is much easier to give to someone than the mission of God.

01:00:13

700 pages and 200 pages are different things. I'm really looking forward to it.

01:00:20

I bought a case of the mission of God a few years ago. I'm going to do the same thing again with this one.

01:00:26

We'll get them out to everybody we can. You're fast becoming one of my best fellows here,

01:00:32

James. Not trying to. No, no, not not doing that. I'm just telling people, honestly, it was extremely helpful, extremely clarifying.

01:00:42

I don't know. We've got a little bit over time here. But is being in the midst of what's happening in Canada, does that help clarify as you're writing, maybe motivate while you're writing?

01:00:57

Or is that more of a more of a hindrance? What would you say? Because you were obviously working on this during periods of lockdown and everything else.

01:01:08

Oh, no, without question, it's been a tremendous help to me because there's a certain crystallizing and clarification process that goes on.

01:01:17

And then also direct applications, things that somebody like Father Abraham Kuyper couldn't have even imagined when he was trying to first delineate the biblical idea of spheres of sovereign authority.

01:01:39

And so now I've actually found it. I guess one of the silver linings, you could say, of this very, very difficult period has been,

01:01:49

I think, that we are in a time when things are being crystallized for the church, when things are being clarified, where we're seeing, while that expression, the antithesis is being really pressed.

01:02:07

We are really seeing the utter decimation of the myth of religious neutrality, which the sort of secular period before moving into this more secular, overtly pagan period that we're moving into now had tried to sort of cling on to the remnants of Christianity, but stripped, denuded of its doctrinal foundations and sort of pass itself off as a sort of neutral political liberalism.

01:02:36

And that has really been destroyed by the last two years and everything that's going on.

01:02:42

And of course, now this sort of legislation. So it's been actually clarifying, James, and I would say has actually helped me in the writing process of focusing on what's most relevant and most useful for the church,

01:02:55

I hope. Yes. Doug Wilson likes to use the reference from Hebrews, God is shaking all things, so that which cannot be shaken is all that remains.

01:03:05

And that's really what we are seeing. There's no two ways about it. Well, Dr. Joe Boot, thank you very, very much for bringing us up to speed.

01:03:14

Obviously, we are going to be praying for you and the faithful brothers in Canada who are clearly going to stand firm on this issue.

01:03:26

We certainly pray for those. I'm not so much, I'm not sure how to pray for churches that gave up on the gospel a long time ago, but there are churches that in Canada, and we won't mention names or anything, you would probably think of them immediately, that seemingly are trying to walk a middle line and something like C4 wipes out the middle line.

01:03:50

There is no middle line left. There's no mediating position here.

01:03:57

You can't semi -compromise with Caesar when Caesar says, stop believing what

01:04:02

Jesus taught. And so my prayer for those churches is that this will be a point of clarity and that God will grant repentance and bring a fire of commitment to the truth.

01:04:19

And that the Lord will use all these things to his honor and glory. And we'll be praying for you all and your ministry up there.

01:04:26

And thank you very, very much for joining us today. Thank you, James. Well, Satan has desired to sift us like wheat, but pray for us that our faith doesn't fail.

01:04:35

Indeed. Indeed, we will. Thank you, Dr. Joseph Boot. Thank you very much. God bless you, sir. God bless. Thank you.

01:04:42

All right. Sometimes we think of Canada as our 51st state and it's not.

01:04:52

And wow, I hope you heard what

01:04:58

Bill C -4 is like. That passed unanimously. No one had the backbone to stand up and say, this is wrong.

01:05:12

Look, even if you're not a Christian, if you have some idea of right and wrong, that should have been a no brainer.

01:05:25

But nobody had the backbone to stand up and say, this is an abomination.

01:05:34

Had you heard about all that? Some of it. Yeah. Just astonishing.

01:05:39

It's absolutely astonishing. So I've put on Twitter the URL. I will link to it in the description.

01:05:46

I'll keep the window open here. LibertyCoalitionCanada .com

01:05:53

biblical -sexuality -sermon -sunday.

01:06:03

That will bring it up. And you'll see Bill C -4, how should the church respond and what you can do there.

01:06:11

And so there you go. Yes, sir.

01:06:19

So I want to put a, just as we wrap up this segment, like we talked about this morning,

01:06:25

I want to put a curtain on this, close the show, open up a new show. Oh.

01:06:31

And then, because you've got more to go, right? I do. Okay. So let's create two files.

01:06:37

We'll have two different programs for the day. Okay. Just an experiment. It's a thought, you know?

01:06:44

Okay. Well, there's more to come, but it will be coming. I'm not sure how long that's going to take.

01:06:51

Five minutes. All right. We'll be back in five minutes. More to come on the subject of Psalm 33 and Molinism.