Do Not Fear The Woke - A Lesson From the Bible

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The Bible wisely points out that there is nothing new under the sun. Anything that's been done now has been done before.

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And people have been sinning in the same ways for millennia.

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And this struck me today, and I talked about this verse yesterday, and I want to talk about it again today.

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This is John, the book of John, chapter 7. This is right during the

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Feast of Booths. As Jesus is preaching, street preaching at the Feast of Booths, and the

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Pharisees and the Sadducees, the officials of Israel, they want to arrest him.

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And so they send out the Levites to go arrest him. The Levites come back, and they didn't arrest him, and the

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Pharisees wonder, why didn't you arrest him? And the officers, you know, the

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Levites, said to them, nobody ever spoke like this man. They're just amazed at what they heard.

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The Pharisees immediately questioned them, so you've been deceived too, I guess. And they point out that none of the authority structures have believed in Jesus, even though that wasn't true.

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They said, none of the authorities have trusted in Jesus, so you think you know the law? Trying to essentially make a claim that, you know, the guild essentially, the people that were smart didn't believe in him, but it was really just the fools that believed in him.

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And Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees. He was one of them. And he had gone to Jesus previously in the book, and he says to the

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Pharisees, he says, look, does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?

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The idea here is that we have a law, and we have due process in that law, and the point is that you find out what's really the case.

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You don't start with the conclusion and then try to find facts that fit the conclusion that you've come to.

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And the response of the Pharisees is so interesting, and this has just resonated with me.

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This happens today. This happens today. They hear Nicodemus bringing the law to bear, rationality, considering what

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God says is important, and it's a matter of principle for him. First we have to establish the facts, and then we can condemn a man if the case is established on the evidence of two or more witnesses and all of that.

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You can't start with the conclusion. And listen to what the Pharisees respond to Nicodemus.

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They respond with an accusation, oh, you must be one of those Galileans too.

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You must be one of them. Brothers, I think you probably know where I'm going with this.

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This week, this past few weeks actually, have just been a disaster for the church of God when it comes to these killings, the charges of race -based killings.

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First it was Ahmaud Arbery, then it was this woman, she didn't kill anybody, but she called the police on this bird watcher, whatever it was.

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And then it was this one that came out yesterday that looks pretty bad. It looks like this officer is just leaning on this guy's neck and chokes him out essentially to death.

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And I've seen so many Christians will say things like, well, my conscience within me,

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I cannot stay silent any longer. We must arrest them immediately. We know what motivated all of these things.

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We know it's already established facts. We cannot be silent. And I even saw

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Duke Quan here, he tied all these together. That's what everybody's doing. It's the same problem in each of these cases, the

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Ahmaud Arbery situation, it's the same problem. Some white guys wanted to kill a black jogger. That's the established facts of the case.

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This woman, she called the police on this guy because he was black. She knew that they would do her bidding because she was white and he was black.

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And then this officer who killed this man, it's all the same problem.

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It's all racism to Duke Quan. You see, what happened here is that Duke Quan had a narrative.

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He already knew what had happened and now he goes and looks for data that fits that.

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It's the exact opposite of what we should do. We have a law that has due process. First you got to find out who the victim is, who's the one that's been sinned against.

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Like with the Ahmaud Arbery situation, I'm not entirely sure who the victim is. You can be a victim and end up dead and likewise you could not be a perpetrator and end up killing someone.

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Those are possible categories and we need to figure out what's what. That's a very complicated case, but our law is set up in such a way that it tries to pull from the law of God and it says, look, you need to establish facts.

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You can't start with the conclusion and then find things that fit the conclusion that you started with.

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That's backwards. That's unjust. That's what the Pharisees were trying to do with Christ. They said, well, no, no, he's guilty and now let's go find how he's guilty and Nicodemus is like, well, hold on a second.

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Does our law allow us to do that, to condemn him first and without a trial, without establishing the facts of the matter and the

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Pharisees respond, oh, you must be one of them. You must be a Galilean too and that's what we hear now.

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If you say, well, hold on a second. Do process here with this Ahmaud Arbery thing. This looks pretty complicated.

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This looks like we need to establish the facts of the matter and we need to look at all the evidence and stuff like that before we say that these two white guys killed this guy because he was a black jogger, which is, which seems so far fetched and the facts don't really seem to indicate that.

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And when you say that, what, what are they, what do they accuse you of? It's so similar to the

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Pharisees. When you say, well, hold on, we need to wait for the facts to come out about this woman, about this man and all that kind of stuff.

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What happens? Well, they say, well, you must be one of them. You must be a white supremacist too.

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It's the same thing. There's nothing new under the sun. It's not about being on my team or your team.

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I don't know what happened here, right? Like I said, the third one, the one where he's on his neck, that's looks awful.

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It looks awful, but that doesn't allow me to set aside biblical principles and not just biblical principles, but, but just any kind of rational thinking.

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God gave us brains. We need to establish the facts first before we condemn a man. And then definitely,

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I mean, it looks to me pretty clear cut. I mean, it looks to me pretty clear cut, but the thing is we don't set aside our principles just because it looks to us like it's pretty clear cut.

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Because even if we, let's just say we set aside our principles for a minute and turns out we're right, you can't guarantee that every time it's going to turn out we're right.

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We're going to make mistakes. That's why due process is there. That's why that's the principle from the scripture.

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You establish the case first and then you move on to punishment. Look, if these guys, if this, if this, if this police officer killed this black guy, he deserves the death penalty.

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It's just, I mean, it's very simple in the scripture, but, but you gotta establish that first.

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And I've seen this rodeo too many times to just jump to conclusions because so often when people say, no, no, no, no, you got to accept the drumbeat.

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He's guilty, guilty, racism, racism, racism. So often it turns out to not be the case. The more data that comes out.

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And I'm not saying that's the case here. This again, this looks pretty bad, but don't just accept that drumbeat.

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Don't just go along with it. Don't, don't, don't fear when they say, Oh, you must be a Galilean too.

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Cause that's their tactic. They want you scared. You see, most people were scared of the

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Pharisees. They didn't want to be Peter. You know, he said, you're one of them. Peter's like, well, no, no, no, I'm not one of them.

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He was scared to death. What might happen if it was, if, if it got out that he was a Galilean too.

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He was one of them. And likewise, there's so many white people right now today that are scared to death.

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The social justice, justice Pharisees out there, the woke Pharisees out there, and they are

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Pharisees, they're going to hear you push back and say, yeah, but you know, we got to establish the facts of them.

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We need data. We need to prove this, this discrimination. We got to prove these despairs.

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We got to prove this stuff. They're scared to death of the response because they know what it's going to be. Oh, you must be one of those white supremacists too.

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Oh, that's white fragility. You're just trying to defend whiteness and white power. They're scared to death.

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There's nothing new under the sun. Be a Nicodemus. Be willing to stand up to obvious breaches of biblical morality and ethics and all of that stuff.

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And don't let them shut you down by being scared of their accusations. You must be a