This Week in Witchcraft - S1:E10

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan.

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Can you spot it out in the wild? I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are

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Michael Durham and Andrew Hudson. Michael has a nice little bit of witchcraft for us to analyze again today.

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Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about libertarianism. It has become very evident in recent decades in our

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American culture that there's more than a right and left debate. There's also an authoritarian libertarian debate as well.

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So things move along two axes, not just one. And in this regard, libertarianism is very recently being promoted more and more as the antidote to the despair of tyranny.

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And of course, we're against tyranny. All God -fearing people should be against tyranny and despotism that is so manifest amongst people of different persuasions.

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But if you live in a country where you're told you can no longer work to provide for your family, you're not allowed to go to church, you're not allowed to come out of your house and travel for more than 10 kilometers from your home except to get food.

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And even then, you have to have papers and a permit to do so. These types of experiences which have been common in our world in the last couple, three years, should be and are rightly condemned as tyrannical and botic.

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Is the solution, is the salvation, is the proper response libertarianism?

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There is an authoritarianism in the cancel culture of if you don't celebrate

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Pride Month or if you don't rejoice in rioting, if you don't agree with certain concepts, then you don't get to have your business or you don't get to have your public space in social media, so on and so forth.

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There's an authoritarianism there where you just get shut down and canceled and things taken away from you.

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This also is rightly condemned and identified as despotic and tyrannical.

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But is the answer the ideals of libertarianism? And let's just give a quick definition of that.

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Libertarianism promises that if everybody is allowed to believe whatever they want, live however they want, that everybody's assured freedom to say whatever they want, believe whatever they want, and live however they want assures freedom for everybody else.

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And so that there should be a rejoicing in the absolute autonomy of every individual, a very strong individualism, okay, that this will assure that nobody is going to be brought under the tyranny of anyone else.

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That's the promise of libertarianism. The problem is that when you define liberty, when you define liberty as you get to believe whatever you want and live however you want, this is not how the scripture defines liberty.

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Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. And the spirit of God is sovereign, the spirit of God is truth, the spirit of God brings to our attention those commandments of our

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Lord and Savior, King of Kings, Jesus Christ. And there is liberty in living in Christ.

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There is liberty from the death of trespasses and sins. There is liberty from slavery to sin.

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There is liberty from the snare of the fear of man and the slavery of the fear of death.

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And there is liberty to work righteousness. There is liberty from despair and so on.

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There's all kinds of liberty, but we're under the authority of someone who has all authority.

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And there is liberty in having one Lord. And he has his various ministers and deacons and those he puts in charge of us, such as there's the state and its proper role, and there's hierarchy in the state, there's hierarchy in family, there's hierarchy in our churches, and so on.

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These are good. And they're all under the lordship of Christ. And what liberty there is when we have one

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Lord working through his various ministers in our life to make sure that we are blessed by his rule in our life in various ways.

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What liberty there is in serving one Lord, but there is not actual liberty in libertarianism.

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Libertarianism envisions a salvation in which the tyranny of the state is replaced with the tyranny of a thousand, a 10 ,000, 10 million, hundreds of millions of sovereigns.

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Could it be summed up with a quote from the Patriot? Why would I want 2 ,000 tyrants one mile away when

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I have one tyrant 2 ,000 miles away? Right. And so there's a sense in which there's a false claim because there's a false presupposition.

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The false claim is that freedom is found in everybody just doing whatever they want. But the false presupposition is that the beliefs and statements and actions of others have no impact on, now that's a false presupposition.

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In the scriptures, we are told it matters a great deal how we love one another.

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Of course, the first of this is to love God supremely. The second of this is to love each other rightly.

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And we cannot love each other rightly if we don't love God supremely. And loving God supremely means there's a standard, that he's our authority, that we live according to his word.

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And we cannot treat one another rightly, for instance, each other's property rights, each other's freedom of conscience, each other's free enterprise, and so on.

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We cannot treat one another rightly unless we love God supremely, but loving God supremely does not accord with libertarianism.

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Libertarianism says you can love whatever you want supremely, in fact, you better love yourself supremely. And this does not end up in freedom, this is built on an illusion of neutrality, but you end up ensnared by the fear of man anyway.

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Consider the bondage, consider the slavery, consider the ensnarement of living in a world where everybody gets to believe whatever they want to believe and do whatever they want to do, and you must always affirm that and say, yeah, do whatever you want,

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I don't care. Believe whatever you want, I don't care. Has no impact on me, which is false.

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But even saying that, what are you doing? Are you loving others rightly by saying, I don't have anything to do with you and you don't have anything to do with me?

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I'm not my brother's keeper. Well, exactly. And by this, we know love, 1 John 3, 16, that he laid down his life for the brethren.

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So also we got to lay down our lives for the brethren. What is the distinction made between Jacob and Esau? God is their definition for love, and he says,

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Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated. How did God love Jacob? Jacob was not worthy of God's love.

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God did not love Jacob because he was lovely. He was a scoundrel, but God loved

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Jacob by always hounding him, pursuing him, not giving up on him, confronting him with the promises that he had made, even wounding him and changing his name.

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Look at that love. Look at that love. Jacob, I have loved Esau, I have hated.

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The story of Esau and Genesis 36, read it for yourself, the story of Esau is godless.

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God has nothing to do with Esau. God does not intervene with Esau. God just let Esau go and do whatever

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Esau wanted. And here you see God's hatred of Esau. Now if God has a definition of love and hate, isn't this the definition of hate?

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If a man says to his wife, I don't have anything to do with you, you just go do whatever you want. That is hateful.

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That is hateful. Now that's not the only expression of hate, but that is certainly hateful. And if I say to my neighbor, I have nothing to do with you,

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I don't care what you believe, I don't care what you do, am I loving my neighbor rightly? Not at all.

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And so this is not something that accords with Christianity. Libertarianism does not accord with Christianity.

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There are things that libertarians value, such as property rights, such as being anti -tyrannical, that we can certainly agree on, but the reasons why we agree to them are different.

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Yeah, they have faulty premises. Yes, and we have to acknowledge that. We need to be conscious of that. And if you do the internal critique,

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I mean, libertarianism, everybody can do as they please, they don't apply that to their economic views.

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The respect for property rights and for freedom of exchange or free markets actually do not accord with anybody can do what they want.

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There has to be a standard or a law that allows for free markets, that allows for property rights because they're upheld by God, they're rights given by God, and they're not just something we came up with on our own.

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And that's where usually the false presuppositions are coming from, but they don't apply them correctly, and they don't apply them evenly, and all their beliefs are their cherished principles either.

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I'm going to read from Isaiah chapter nine, starting in verse six, for unto us, a child is born unto us, a son is given and the government will be upon his shoulder and his name will be called wonderful counselor, mighty

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God, everlasting father, prince of peace, and of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end and upon the throne of David and over his kingdom to order it and establish it with judgment and justice.

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From that time forward, even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

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Would you then say, with the light that we have here, that Christians cannot be libertarian?

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Yeah, absolutely. We can be liberty minded without being libertarian, and I think that that's important to note.

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And I think that we can be positive about authority without advocating authoritarianism.

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And this is where, and this is not, mind you, this is not some sort of Hegelian dialectic where we are saying, okay, authoritarianism is the thesis, libertarianism is the antithesis.

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Through the Christian scriptures and Christian doctrine and Christian tradition, we can forge a new synthesis and a way forward, the third way, not at all, not at all.

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Libertarianism is a departure from the word of God that was established to describe what liberty looks like, what liberty is in the

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Lord. And authoritarianism is a departure from the word of God, a misuse of authority, an abuse of God's good design for authority and hierarchy.

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Christianity is not a synthesis of libertarianism and authoritarianism.

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Christianity declares the word of God, calling libertarians and authoritarians to repentance, to come and submit themselves to Christ and to quit their vain raging against Him.

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Yeah, they have the same problem that the authoritarians that they're fighting against have. They just want to be their own little kings.

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They want to be their own little tyrants. And with the Bible, we have government shown as God's deacon for punishing the evildoer.

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And not just that, but also rewarding or at least approving those who do righteousness as well.

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And I think that's a part of it that libertarians take out. It's like a freedom from responsibilities to do good things and to be my brother's keeper or to add value sometimes.

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And it's like their perfect government is their own government, is themselves.

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And where you have to have self -governance, you do have to have self -governance, but it's always under the authorities that God has placed.

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And he has placed governments in this world to be his deacons against unrighteousness. Correct.

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And libertarians are not consistent because they do want standards and they do want, as you've already pointed out, with the economics and finances and so on, but also in terms of their freedoms.

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They're not in favor of letting everybody do whatever they want, because that would take away from them.

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So who's supposed to enforce nobody treading on me?

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Don't tread on me. Who's going to enforce that? Some syndicate of people who band together.

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Well, it has to be a state. And imagine this, imagine this with all the various conflicts exponentially multiplied by everybody doing whatever and believing whatever they want.

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And that means there's exponentially all the more areas where someone's going to tread on you.

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How do you keep that from happening? You need a humongous state to enforce that.

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So libertarianism is self -refuting. And statism is self -refuting because the ones who run the state want to do whatever they want.

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They want complete freedom. We saw that with the lockdowns and the restrictions that those who were enforcing it had no interest in following it and they didn't follow it.

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And they were exposed as hypocrites and everybody's howling at, you know, the fact that obviously they didn't believe the science.

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They were just using it to ride herd on the rest of us. So statism is self -refuting.

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Libertarianism is self -refuting. So in those obvious absurdities, you have opportunities to describe, you know, why is it that you believe in big government, but then you still want freedom of choice?

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Or why is it that you believe in freedom of choice, but you need the state to give you that freedom?

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And to talk to people about their self -refuting absurdities as an opportunity to talk to them about the wisdom of Christ.

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Yeah, I think where we can agree with libertarians is a free market of exchange.

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And we do want smaller governments like they do. I mean, maybe in a more decentralized fashion, even to where more municipal involvement and power in local governments rather than, you know, tyrannical federal level types of governance.

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Yeah. So, I mean, there's points of agreement. And I think that at some levels we can recognize where we are co -belligerents in certain areas, but we also have to recognize that there's a different reason why they're coming to the table.

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Yeah, for sure. Self -control is kind of at the base of this part of their premise.

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However, what we see with research on willpower, the people who study it indicate that man's willpower is used up and you're more susceptible to giving into indulgences and other aspects of your life whenever you exercise willpower over other areas that you're focusing on.

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But that's not what we see with the fruit of the spirit. Right. So the scriptures obviously tell us about the depravity of man, ongoing slaves to sin.

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But consider how it works. I mean, the dynamic that we see in the church, for example, where there is leadership in the church, but it's somewhat decentralized in the sense that the elders have their role, but it's not just one man.

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And they're all working together as equals to help shepherd the church. But then you also have families which are, the fathers are not subservient to the elders for everything they're doing with their family, right?

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They're being called to proper governance and they're being called to proper self -governance under the authority of Christ.

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So the elders are always pointing the folks of the church to Christ authority, not their own personal authority, right?

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And how that works. And then the households together, they need to, you know, they're supposed to love one another and then they engage with each other.

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And, you know, the more healthy the churches are, the less robust of a state you need.

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Amen to that. If we as Christians or a church in, say, any given state, America or somewhere in Europe, if we're more responsible, there's less need of it.

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And so when we see our state expanding, we're failing at that job, aren't we? Yeah. It's just a sign, you know, preach more gospel.

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Right. All right. Well, I think we have wrapped up that conversation about libertarianism and we'll move on to what content we would recommend to you.

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All right. I've got a book, another book by Tom Nettles. It's called Southern Baptist Sermons on Sovereignty and Responsibility.

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And it's by various men who were founders of the

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Southern Baptist Convention. And it's a biographical sketch of Manley, Johnson, Howell, and Fuller by Tom Nettles and sermons that they gave that address the issue.

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Again, getting at what was the perspective of early Southern Baptists on the sovereignty of God.

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So that would be of interest to someone, I'm sure. I'm going to recommend to you, Victory in Jesus, The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism by Greg Bonson.

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This was my first introduction or a primer to postmillennialism, and it was a good starting point for me.

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I came from a premillennialist charismatic background and then I guess basically migrated towards more amillennialist understanding of eschatology.

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This was very helpful with understanding the postmillennial worldview. Amen. So a few years ago,

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I wanted to do a concentrated study on prayer.

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And I went through that with my old pastor at Berry Road, and he recommended a few different works, one by A .W.

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Pink. And I went through Bunyan on prayer. But what really kind of jumped out at me was when

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I went to John Calvin's treatise on prayer. And that really reformed my prayer life and understanding how

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I am to pray and how I am to commune with God and how prayer actually functions as well in God's economy.

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And the second one, another one I would recommend right off the back end of that was I think it was like six sermons from Spurgeon that were put together on prayer.

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And it is very rich with illustrations that jump out to me from some of the scriptures that he pulled some of the believers praying before, after, or during certain instances that they came across.

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And it was a real rich, just sit down and it's a real easy read, not very long, but John Calvin on prayer and the set of sermons by Spurgeon on prayer as well.

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And that wraps it up for today. We're always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week and for supporting us by rating, reviewing, and sharing the show.

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And we hope you can join us again for another week of uncovering and rebuking witchcraft in the modern world.