God Centered Podcast - Episode 16 - God Centered Understanding Of God's Law

God Centered Theology

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Welcome back to On the Road, this is Andy Cain, and it is a joy to be back with you once again.

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This is the podcast that takes you from carpool to work, talking all things God -centered. And so we're talking today about God -centered understanding of God's law, which is something

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Christians seem to struggle with. We expect the world to be antagonistic and hate

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God's law and want to come up with every possible reason in the world why you should not murder without attributing it to Jesus Christ, having said it in His Word.

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It is the Christians that concern me when we talk about we want to see God's law applied to all parts of life in every nation.

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And when we talk about the fact that it will be, this world will be covered with the knowledge of the

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Spirit of God and of Jesus Christ, and the nations will be discipled, it will take the amount of time that God has decreed that it will take as He builds

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His Kingdom. And we don't do newspaper exegesis around here. But when you say that, it's this crazy reaction, like, oh dear, cause like America and free speech and separation of church and state, blah, blah, blah,

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I'm like, yeah, cause clearly the atheists and the leftists and all these people, they clearly are all about neutrality, right?

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I mean, it's not like they're trying to impose morality on us, like murdering babies and, you know, open borders and, you know, all these things and they lie and cheat and steal.

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I'm sure they really, really care about neutrality. You know, it's amazing to me.

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So anyway, watching this movie called Time Changer and the main character has written this manuscript for a book, and this is back in the late 1800s.

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And the thesis is that, you know, we can teach Christian morality and Christian law and all these things without attributing

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Jesus Christ's name to it. And he has one of his colleagues heavily oppose it and say, you can't do that.

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He's very adamant about it. And he's like, you know, when you would quote Shakespeare, you wouldn't just quote it and not attribute it.

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You would say Shakespeare says. And so he's trying to convey to him, you know, it's, we say, do not murder, do not steal, do not lie, because Jesus says, you know, all these things.

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And this is why we have such trouble today, because we have a nation that's, that's wanting to define marriage and define gender and sexuality and identity and all these things in every way possible, contrary to scripture and contrary to what

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God has said. Like we talk about when we talk about God -centered church, it matters not what man thinks, but what

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God has said. We see this in every area of life. Anytime you have a man -centered understanding of anything or a man -centered foundational disposition, you see an antagonism and you see implementation of things that are contrary to God's word.

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And in the Christian world, you know, we try to say, oh no, no, we're all for Jesus, but we don't want to push it on him.

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Yes. Okay. Yeah. The myth of neutrality has been debunked, destroyed.

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There is no neutrality as Dr. White has taught us, and many others have taught us.

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There is, or excuse me, there are no neutral worldviews.

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We need to stop with this. Stop pretending that a human being can be neutral.

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A lot of this comes from the anti -reformed understanding of soteriology, that a man's just neutral and he's basically good.

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He's just trying to do the best he can. He doesn't really hate God. He can make, no, men and women are

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God haters in their unregenerate state. They're God haters. They love their sin. They must be raised to life in Christ to love him and have faith in him.

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So anyway, the guy's like, okay, so come to my house tonight and we'll settle this.

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He comes over and the guy's like, by the way, I invented time travel. I'm just like, what an interesting thing to tell your guest.

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Somebody comes over to your home and you just nonchalantly out of nowhere like, by the way,

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I invented time travel. Like, okay, right.

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Now, granted, this is fiction. It's not real. So anyway, he sends him a hundred years into the future or something like that.

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You know, he sees how a world that doesn't attribute anything to Jesus Christ operates and it's everything you would expect it to be.

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He even runs into a little girl at one point who was stealing or doing something and he's, you know, he's telling her, you know, you shouldn't do that.

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And she's like, why? And at first thought was what an obnoxious little young, but he's like, tries to explain it to her.

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And then she says, well, who says? And the main character is just like dumbfounded and it dawns on him.

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That's the point. The take out a law and sort of another law, whatever law you're talking about, whatever standard you're talking about, whatever it is, you can insert anything you want to.

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Don't steal, don't lie, whatever. If there's no authority behind it, there's no reason for enforcing it.

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See, if we are just random bags of gas and particles and things and accidents, cosmic accidents and there's no

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God, there's no decree, you know, as, as Gary DeMar has said in his book, it's okay to eat your neighbor.

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If atheism is right, nothing is wrong. That's the point. There is no way to be consistent, to consistently say something is wrong because if there's no true authority outside of yourself to say this is wrong, well, then who are you to tell me anything?

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Well, you shouldn't murder people because as a community and as a culture, we've evolved to know that. Like, okay. Well, what if it evolved to say it's perfectly okay to just kill and do whatever you want?

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They always immediately like, well, that wouldn't be okay. Well, why? Who says? Somebody has to say, and if it's culture, well, then cultures can change.

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If it's the government, well, governments change. God doesn't change. Thou shall not murder, as they say in the old

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King James, or you should not murder. Actually, the King James says thou shall not kill, which is one of the interesting things about King James.

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All he is, it has an incorrect translation. It's supposed to be, it should be murder. Anyway, I digress.

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The guy goes back, realizes this is wrong, writes the ship, all these good things.

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And so that's the point. A God -centered understanding of God's law understands that it is God's law.

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I don't understand what is the issue here. It's his law. Christians didn't come up with it.

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I didn't come up with it. You didn't come up with it. God didn't come up with it. It's just his nature.

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It's who he is. He's righteous and holy and all these things. He says, don't do this, don't do that.

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It's his morality, his world, his law. Because he's the creator, it's his right to determine how his creatures should operate.

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And so the God -centered understanding of God's law. So yes, there are some interesting characters out there that would call themselves

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Christian nationalists or postmen or whatever. I don't get all up into that. I mean, yes,

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I kind of understand what some of them are trying to do. I would just say, let's stick with the eschatology of hope, understanding the postmillennialistic, if that is a word, understanding that God is building his kingdom.

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He's doing it, obviously, very gradually. And it's like the mustard seed that starts off very slow, but it gets very large.

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And I would imagine that at the point in which things start growing in that way, it'll probably happen very rapidly,

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I would imagine, and then you'll see the nations discipled. But Christ is going to reign until all his enemies are defeated, and he's defeating them in his time and in his way, and we've seen many of them defeated over time.

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Secular humanism is a big one right now. We will see it fall because people will see its folly and run from it, and it will crash and burn like any other worldview that hates

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Christ. It can't sustain itself, and so it will be destroyed. It will come down.

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And so we don't do newspaper exegesis. Anything that's happening in the world doesn't make us think, well, you know, it is or is not.

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No, it's true because of the exegesis of Scripture, obviously.

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And we will see, and we have seen over the 2 ,000 years that he's been doing it, roughly, that he is growing his kingdom.

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He's working on it. It was more Christian's Lives Day than it ever has been. And we need to get to work as Christians teaching

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God's law in our churches and in our communities and understanding that it's not a top -down political way that he builds his kingdom, but through the regeneration of hearts.

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So if you're living in a time period like we are, where the vast majority of people are not saved, obviously we're not in a place to operate like we would if it was the case, but it doesn't mean we're not working to influence and call on the nations to submit to God, submit to Christ, submit to his law.

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And we don't force it to happen. God handles these things. And people always say, well, you know,

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I'm praying for government turnaround or country turnaround. I'm like, okay, that's great and good. What if it happened?

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That's the thing people don't ever stop to think about. God saved 80 % of everybody in government on the local, national, federal level tomorrow.

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What would that look like? We're saying that's going to happen one day. We're going to see God regenerate a vast number of people.

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But it may just come from over time as people are saved and they have children that are saved and it just naturally happens.

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Will he do it supernaturally? Have a lot of people saved in a certain short amount of time? I don't know how he'll do it.

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It'll be, I believe it'd be very gradual. Doug Wilson seems to think we could still be in the early church. It's certainly possible.

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It seems that way. But you know, those are stories for another day. The main point is that God meant what he said when he gave us his law and when you have a

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God -centered understanding of it and implement it in our lives and our families and our churches and our communities, so on and so forth.

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So thank you for joining me on this episode of Gone the Road. I hope you guys have a great day on this