What Will Heaven Be Like?

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The main reason is that Marxism and this cultural Marxism, because they do have a vision of cultural victory.

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And the evangelical church, by and large, does not. Oh, wow. That's powerful. That's good. That's a big thought.

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No, and I think that that's critically important to hang on to. It's just that point, Dr. Sandlin, about concern for this life and this world, right, that you have the secularists really investing themselves in the world itself.

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And obviously, there's perverse examples of that and perverse presuppositions of that. They're not biblical.

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They're not righteous. They're not good. We don't want to highlight those things, as those are supremely valuable things, but we're saying that they have an actual concern for this life, this world, culture, society, communities here and now.

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At least they profess to have those presuppositions. So can you just talk for a moment about in contrast about that in terms of like the

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Christian view of like, you know, it's we want to escape this world. We want to get out of this world.

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This world is bad. This world is evil. You know, we want to get away to the better sort of spiritual existence out there.

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You know, a man that I work with closely now passed away long dead. Put it this way.

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R .J. Rastuni, he made an excellent point. He said the liberals believe in history, but not God. He says the fundamentalists believe in God, but not history.

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We need to believe in both God and history. The problem, I think, with too many of these evangelicals is their view, and this is on my mind,

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I've got to deliver a lecture soon on Gnosticism. I think they've been influenced by Gnosticism.

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For Gnosticism, essentially creation is inherently defective. So anything material, anything of this world, the human body and the extensions of this world, the institutions, like art and education and politics, all of these are inherently corrupt.

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Not just that they're fallen, as the Bible says, and infected by sin, but inherently corrupt, and therefore the only thing left is escape.

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That's what the Gnostics believed. Now, I wouldn't say that evangelicals have bought in hook, line, and sinker to Gnosticism.

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That would not be fair. But this Gnostic mentality has influenced them such that they don't recognize the value of this world.

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Now, here's something, Jeff, people don't understand. If you actually read the Bible, the

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Bible has very little to say about Heaven and the afterlife. Now, it does say there is an afterlife, thank

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God we will, our eternal life will end with Him, but it will be according to the Book of Revelation, as I interpret

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Revelation, on a glorified, resurrected Earth, not up in Heaven somewhere. So we have this sort of medieval idea, we'll all be floating around, you know, playing harps, and it's sort of the angels will be near us, and just everything's ethereal.

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But in the Bible, there's a great materiality. God, it is true, is a spirit. He's not material, but He created a good material world.

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So faithfulness in Christianity is essentially faithfulness in this very material, corporeal, concrete world.

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There is another world, the world of God and the Holy Spirit, and let's be honest, evil spirits, Satan and so on, and we're constantly having an interpenetration between those two worlds.

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But this world, this material world, is vitally important to God, and in fact, we're not being faithful Christians if we buy into a

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Gnostic view of essential, essentially, escape. Right, and just to highlight this for maybe people who are newer believers, maybe don't understand a bit of the church history here, where we've come from, the

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Gnostics were fought against, at the earliest beginnings there of Gnosticism and the influence in the church, they were fought against in the very pages of the

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New Testament, and so we have the remnants of those debates happening in the New Testament itself, and we also, of course, have the glaring examples of the conflict between the people of God and Gnosticism in the second century of the church.

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That's right. So this is a very well -known worldview that has been an enemy of the

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Christian church and the people of God since the very, very beginning, but— It's important to remember, Gnosticism is the oldest and the most pernicious and most resistant heresy in all of the history of the church.

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Use the term worldview. This is very important. Pelagianism and Arianism don't have time to explain exactly what they mean.

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Those are errors on particular, specific doctrines of Christology and salvation, and they are evil, but Gnosticism is an entirely alien worldview.

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Yes, yes. The entire view of the world is perverted, and that's why it's so dangerous. Yes. So, okay,

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I'll end it on this, and let's go back into Marxism for a second, Dr. Sandlin. So you are saying—and this is so crazy, because it's such a shocker to people, modern evangelicals—you are saying that when the final judgment comes, we will be living together with God—heaven and earth come together again—on this physical earth in physically resurrected bodies.

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We're not going to be simply, for all eternity, disembodied spirits floating around in a gassy existence with fat babies playing harps on clouds.

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Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. That's more of this ancient pagan scholastic Greek view of anthropology.

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Now I want to be clear. The Bible—it's not just as the materialists say, the humanists, that man is just blood and bones.

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That's, of course, equally wrong. The biblical view of man is that this other view, the spiritual, the so -called spiritual, the immaterial part of man, is woven into the body.

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So the Bible does say, Paul says, I'm absent from the body and present with the Lord, but not fully, not entirely.

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And that's why the resurrection is so vital. Now let's think about this for a minute, Jeff. God made man to be a body.

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We read that clearly in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. So humanity without a body is not humanity in full.

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And that's also true. Now think about this. That's also true about the earth. Man without earth is not fully man.

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The earth was created for man. I mean, that's part of this dominion commission there in Genesis 1. So the notion that we would all be sort of flying around in some

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Hellenic Greek notion of a soul which is completely separate from the body and is meant to live separately from the body, that's an ancient

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Greek heresy. That's not a Biblical view. In the Bible, we were meant to live as resurrected people on a resurrected earth.

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So when people say, well, this is the language which is not actually Biblical. Well, you know, the good thing about dying is

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I can die and go to heaven. That's not precisely how the Bible says it. The Bible doesn't speak of dying and going to heaven.

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It does speak of being with the Lord when we die. But the big emphasis in the Bible is on the resurrection, which is obviously very corporeal.

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And the ancient Greeks hated resurrection. They hated the Christian faith largely because of this doctrine that they considered scandalous.

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Yes. So there you go. Some, I know, believers watching this right now are probably really having the wheels start turning now, going, wait, yeah, that's right, the

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Bible does talk about a final judgment, a final resurrection, a resurrected, renewed, restored earth itself.

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The creation itself is waiting, you know, for its release from its bondage to decay and all of that.

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You start thinking through those things and you start to go, wait, yeah, actually God is concerned with this life in this world. It's the physical and the material, the physical and the spiritual.

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Okay. So now back to Marxism, Dr. Sandlin, we are living in very peculiar times right now where you have now people heralding the goodness and the beauty of socialism and Marxism.

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And you have people now actually celebrating such a worldview. Of course, you see many of these platforms now that are very successful, that are funded in large part by George Soros and people like him that are actually propagating this worldview.

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And it's something people are biting down on, saying, yeah, maybe that is a good thing, we should do what Venezuela is doing, we should give it a shot.

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Okay, so let's talk about Marxism. What exactly is it? Yeah, so let's give a quick summary.

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So there's classical Marxism from Marx, and then there's the more recent cultural

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Marxism. Both are very dangerous. Classical Marxism is economic Marxism of the old

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Soviet Union, of Mao's China, and so on, Pol Pot. And it's essentially the notion that everything, everything can be reduced to economics.

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I mean, religion is just basically the upper classes employing a view of God so that they can subjugate the lower economic classes.

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And that's true of ideas and everything else. Well, because of that, Marx believed in socialism.

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Well, if everything's economic, then the way to make everybody happy is to make everything economically equal. Well, of course, we know that's false.

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Everywhere it's been tried, everywhere it's been tried, it's been a spectacular failure. There aren't any exceptions to that.

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But it's just like, it's a constant temptation, because people, a lot of people, I mean, sinful man, let's face it, we want things for free.

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And we want to have the good life without working hard for it. And we believe that we should have as much as everybody else.

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And we don't like the idea of God's providence, which means that there are particular stations in life.

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Some people are wealthy and some are not. And you know what the biblical view is? We have to accept that. Now, we can work hard to make more money.

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There's nothing wrong with that. But I mean, equality, this kind of Marxist equality is not a biblical notion.

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Now, we're all equally made in God's image. We're equally sinners before God. And salvation is equally available within God's elective purposes, of course, to anybody who believes.

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But that's not the equality, of course, that Marxism is talking about. It's essentially talking about economic equality, which is not really biblical at all.

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It's equality of results rather than equality of condition, which is the biblical view.

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Well, so that, in a nutshell, is the classical Marxism. So cultural Marxism is broader.

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It basically holds the cultural Marxist hope that everything should be equalized. Sex should be equalized, not just economic, sex should be equalized.

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And condition in society should be equalized, and age should be equalized, morality should be equalized.

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There shouldn't be one morality greater than another. Cultural Marxism is the war on all hierarchies, particularly white males.

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Yeah. But essentially, cultural

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Marxism, it's an attack on privilege, just as the original economic

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Marxism was an attack on economic privilege, this is an attack on essentially all cultural privilege.

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And you know what God privileges? God privileges His Word. God privileges His Son. God privileges a society given to them, like ancient

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Israel, though it failed. God privileged ancient Israel and His law. They hate that. Yeah.

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So essentially they want to tear down this entire hierarchy, and for them that's what statism is all about.

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And this is what some of our libertarian friends, though I generally agree with them, they don't quite understand. It's not just raw power that the culturalists mark, raw state power.

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They want state power and money to create this perfectly egalitarian society.

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That's the problem. What's that mean? Not just financially, economic egalitarianism, but everything, yeah.

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So I'm sorry to interrupt you, Dr. Sandlin, I just wanted to make sure that we could explain that for people who may not understand what that means. What's that mean, egalitarianism?

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What's that mean? Oh, yeah, sorry. That's the egalitarianism is the view of there must be the fair society, you know, quote social justice, has to be the equal society.

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Now it's important to make this distinction, I've said it before, the Bible teaches equality of processes.

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That is, if the playing field is the same for everybody, then it's fair. Now cultural

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Marxists believe in equality of results. That is, they've got to rig the system in order that everybody else can get the same thing.

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So a good example of this would be like, well, if the Arizona Cardinals football team played a local high school team and beat them, you know, 76 to nothing.

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As long as the rules were the same for both teams, as long as the field was the same, as long as everything else was the same, the game was fair.

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But cultural Marxists would say, well, no, it can't be fair because, I mean, if you can't win by 76 points, then it'd be fair.

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There has to be some unfairness. Well, biblically, we read about the law of just weights and measures and so on.