What Happened to Paul David Tripp?

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I wanna start off today by just forgiving all of you.

That's right. Now, if you're a first -time listener, I have nothing to forgive you for. We don't have an established relationship.

You never had the opportunity to tell me how amazing Goya products are. But if you are a regular listener,

I mean, you've enjoyed my content, especially if you're a patron. I mean, you're helping financially support this, you pray for me, and you knew about Goya products, like this amazing

Cola Champagne, which I thought was just like Coca -Cola, right? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

This is not like Coca -Cola. This is all the amazing goodness of cream soda, root beer, and Coca -Cola in one.

Mm, it is so good. It is so good. I have never had it before. This is my first time. Now, for those who think, oh,

John, you're just trying out Goya stuff because it's controversial now because the

CEO said he liked Trump and the free market, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, you're 100 % right.

That is exactly why I was at the store, and I thought I should check out some Goya products. Now, I'm not completely new to Goya because I have dumped globs,

I mean, just tons of that Adobo stuff on my spaghetti for years. I know, Italian food. But, oh, that Adobo stuff, it is amazing.

The other thing, Gordon Sanchez told me about this, but Tostones, Tostones. Now, Gordon Sanchez, he knows

Spanish. He has, he is, I mean, he may look white, and some of you don't even know who

I'm talking about, but just YouTube Gordon Sanchez, you'll see who I'm talking about. He, you know, he knows a lot about Hispanic culture.

I mean, you could say he basically is Hispanic. I mean, he's called that A .D. Robles. If you don't know who that is, you can

Google him as well. But, and he said, you know, in the A .D. Robles, you're not even Hispanic. I mean, Gordon Sanchez may be more

Hispanic. I'm not sure, but he was the one who recommended Tostones to me. And so I did get some

Tostones. Mm, mm, this is not like a potato chip.

This is, listen, a lot could be going wrong in the world. I'm chewing as I'm talking.

This is so good. I'm gonna have to ignore that the rest of the episode because it's so tempting. There's a lot going wrong in the world, right?

We have riots, and I mean, the list is just, mm.

The list, it just goes on forever about what's going on. But the

Lord gave us taste buds. And I have to say this, free markets, you know, you wanna call it capitalism, this system by which, economically, there are companies, businesses, that in order to get my money, because they're so greedy, right, they want my money, they have to get all the beautiful, wonderful flavors that God has put here and bottle them up and package them and give them to me.

Like, I'm fine with that. I am totally fine with that, and I'm thankful for it. So despite all the things going on in the world, there are things to be grateful for.

And one of them, I guess, I'm finding this out now for the first time, is Goya. And I did not wanna be guilty of oppressing any of you, of depriving you of the amazing goodness of Goya products.

So I had to tell you about how amazing they are. A few announcements, and we'll get started with the topic

I wanna get to today. But number one, two main questions that come up. Question number one, how do we get here in evangelicalism?

I'm stunned. I have now written a book on this. A lot of primary sources, original research.

You're gonna wanna get it when it comes out. I'm looking for publishing companies that are all just self -published. I was told by someone, you need to find an academic publisher.

I wanna get it to you as quickly as I can. It explains what's happening. It's probably, I don't know, 150 pages or so, but I mean, pages and pages and pages and pages of bibliography, primary sources, just because I wanted this to be airtight, steeped in research, and it is.

It's groundbreaking in some ways, just because this has not been covered. And I show you how we went from the 1970s social justice movement, evangelicalism, to what we have today, and the thinking behind it.

Well, I'm gonna wait on that. I was gonna tell you the main thing to draw from that, but I'll probably do some episodes and talk a little more about it.

But I'm not gonna talk about all of it, so you're gonna wanna get the book. If you have any connections to, or maybe you are a publisher, contact me.

I got a few irons in the fire. I'm gonna be talking to some people this week. But hey, if you can do something fast, I mean,

I wanna get this thing on Kindle and print, and maybe even Audible if we can. But I've been working on that.

Even if I don't come out with a video, I've been working on producing resources, and that is one of them. The other question

I get a lot is, what resources do you have for churches? And I have videos, honestly. That's mainly what

I have. I have some articles I've written. But some laymen are starting to write things in churches, and they're sending.

My inbox actually has a bunch of books and things from people who, study guides from people who wanna fight this.

Not all of it is public yet. Once, probably in the next few weeks, once some of this starts going public,

I will have links. I'll probably put together a link page, which I'll just build on, which will have resources. In fact,

I would like to write something, probably late summer, early fall, for churches that is basic and that will help you understand the problems with critical social justice and how it conflicts with biblical theology, et cetera.

So I've been working on that as well. Been really busy. This week's a very busy week. Thankfully, though, we have

Goya products to get us through, so I'm happy. All right, enough about Goya. We're gonna talk today about Paul David Tripp.

And here's the reason I wanna do this. Paul David Tripp, I should probably just tell you, he's a Christian counselor, biblical counselor,

I guess. I think is probably the word he'd use. Speaker, author. When I went to Master's Seminary, I had to read a bunch of his stuff.

When I went to Southeastern, I had to read a bunch of his stuff. I'll be honest with you, I was never a huge fan of Paul David Tripp, and it's not that I disagreed with him, it's just,

I'm like this with most Christian books. They just tend to be written at such a low level, so basic,

I just, like, it's obvious. I'd rather just read the Bible, you know? Or, I don't know, older sermons or theology books or something if I was gonna read biographies of great

Christians. I mean, the more, some of his books are good. I'm not saying they're not, and I haven't read all of them, right?

But, and maybe some of them have really helped you guys out. I'm not taking anything away from that, but just for me, some of the books

I've read, I was just like, eh, you know, it's just basic Christian stuff. I just wasn't impressed. Paul David Tripp, though, has influenced a lot of people, and a lot of conservative people, a lot of reformed people, and I think it was a shock yesterday for some when he came out with this, basically, his woke video.

You know, I'm woke now. That's essentially, if you wanna sum up the video, that's what he's saying. Now, this is not a shock,

I think, to me at least, because I knew about something that you may not have known about.

I'm gonna show that to you. Paul David Tripp wrote an article called My Confession Toward a

More Balanced Gospel on Thursday, April 15th, 2018. This was more than two years ago now, and this is what he said.

I'm gonna take you through a couple of these things and just comment, but here's some statements. For all of my passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ, which has been accurate and faithful to the best of my ability, the gospel that I have held so dear has been, in reality, a truncated and incomplete gospel.

So he's saying, basically, I didn't know the gospel. Didn't know it before something happened to me, before I, he's gonna talk about understanding the experiences of oppression, et cetera.

He didn't understand the gospel completely. He had an incomplete gospel. Now, this is scary. I mean, if that's true, if he's forwarding an incomplete gospel, what does that say about all his writings before 2018?

Were they just, they didn't really have the full gospel in them? I mean, what is the gospel? Isn't it good news for sinners?

That's what the gospel is. Well, Paul David Tripp, I'm gonna just call it, I'm gonna say he is, like a lot of the social justice advocates from the 70s till now, he's corrupting the gospel.

This is what he's doing. I have endeavor, he says, to hold the gospel as the lens through which we see and understand everything we are dealing with between already of our conversion and the not yet of our home going.

All right, this is problem number one. It sounds really good, but it is a problem. Using the gospel as a lens to see everything through.

This is, we hear this language in social justice a lot. Like you need to, you know, the lens of white privilege. We need an oppressed lens to understand things, et cetera.

This lens language is used an awful lot. Using the gospel as a lens. I probably even said that sometimes.

There's nothing innately wrong with using the gospel, meaning using the assumptions behind the gospel.

The good news, you know, means that there's bad news, means that man's sinful, means that, oh, if man's sinful, that has implications.

Okay, if that's what you're talking about, which he probably sort of is, then that's not necessarily wrong in every sense of the word because yes, the gospel, the

Christian worldview or the understandings that come from biblical truth, if we wanna just say that, that's probably the best way to put it.

These things have implications, that's true. But we gotta be very specific on what the gospel is.

And once you start using the gospel as a lens, instead of just the grace of God that is given to sinners, it's a lens by which you think about everything.

It's a lens by which you come to understanding, sociological understandings, economic understandings, et cetera.

You're in dangerous territory there. And maybe I'll do an episode on that sometime, but this was the lie.

And even in the 1970s, there were three streams. There was the liberation theology, the Neo -Cyperian, and there was sort of an

Anabaptist stream, which wasn't the same as the other two. But people that were affected by socialist ideas, new left ideas, and came back to their

Christian traditions found in liberation theologies and Neo -Cyperian theology especially, this holistic understanding of the gospel.

And it was like they went through a second conversion. Jim Wallace even said, you know, hey, I had an actual, my real conversion was when

I realized that the gospel of the kingdom and how that's liberating for the oppressed and Jesus identifies with the poor.

And so then it's like smuggling in all of his socialist ideas that is dangerous stuff that is adding to the gospel.

And adding to the gospel is never a good thing. So you'll have to forgive me for not giving a more complete analysis of this, but I just want you to know that Paul's trip has been influenced by people who have been telling him, yeah, you need something more than you've been advocating.

It's more than just the grace of God. The gospel is this lens through which you're expected to look through everything. And I don't find this language in scripture.

All right, by God's grace, I have become deeply persuaded, he says, that we cannot celebrate the gospel of God's grace without being committed ambassador of the gospel of his justice as well.

The gospel of his justice? The gospel of his justice. So there's two gospels.

This is the thing. This is like what Tom Skinner said in I think Urbana 1970. Yeah, you know, the fundamentalists, they have a gospel.

Mainline denominations who got tangled up in the social gospel, they had a gospel. We just got to combine them. No, the social gospel wasn't a gospel.

The fundamentalists, for whatever failures you want to talk about with fundamentalism, they had the gospel. It's good news that Jesus Christ has come into this world, lived the perfect life, paid for the sins of his people.

And if you repent and put your trust in him, he promises that you will be in a right relationship with God.

You will go to be with him in heaven and dwell with him. It's not actually all that complicated.

That's the gospel. The gospel is the good news. If it's not, if the gospel of his justice, that's not necessarily good news.

The grace is the good news, right? I don't even, I'm just not comfortable with this language.

This language is, where do you find this in scripture? Do you find anything in the Bible talking about the gospel of his justice?

No. The cross forbids me to close my eyes to any form of injustice, whether personal, corporate, governmental, ecclesiastical, or systemic.

Systemic, remember, I've talked about that last episode. That's the invisible kind. You can't find a law. It's not even necessarily about human hearts.

It's just systemic. It's just there. And we gotta overturn everything to get rid of it. So what

Paul David Tripp is saying here is that because of the cross, because of Jesus dying on the cross, he can't close his eye to injustice.

He's connecting these things for Christians who care about the cross, care about the gospel, because what they're gonna do is,

Christians can't be motivated to pursue the social justice stuff. At least they weren't five, 10 years ago.

Most of them still aren't. They can't just be activated to be political activists. If you attach it to the gospel, to the mission of the church, to go into all the world and preach the gospel, if you attach it to that, you can now start persuading people like Paul Tripp, who would never have done it otherwise, but now they think it's part of their

Christian duty because, well, it's part of the gospel. And this is dangerous thinking.

He says, there should be no community that is more present, active, and vocal advocates for justice than the community that preaches the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ.

So he's saying the church needs to be the most present, active, and vocal advocate for justice.

So the church, they need to be the activists. The Christians in the church, that's part of their job.

That's connected to the gospel. Do you see this in the New Testament?

Is this New Testament Christianity? A lot of injustices in the Roman Empire. You wanna talk about injustices in America?

Oh my goodness. I'm not even close to the kind of thing that took place in the

Roman Empire, and especially in an occupied country in Jesus' day, in the time of the apostles.

Slavery. I mean, look, you wanna talk about slavery in the United States. I mean, this kind of slavery had sex slavery that was accepted in the culture as normative.

Gladiatorial rings. I don't remember those in Alabama. I don't think there was. I mean, there's horrible things that happened, but they had slaves in their system.

They had people killing themselves. And if you're a Roman citizen, you couldn't be a slave. I mean, a lot of the things that we complain about happened in the past in America.

It was the present. It was the present and worse for those in the

New Testament. What did Paul do about it? What did Jesus do about it? I mean, that and slavery is just the tip of the iceberg.

You wanna talk about the way that women were treated? You wanna, like, which, what metric do you want to use?

And were those in the church, was that, were that, is that how they were known? Were they the biggest just advocates, the activists for social justice?

No, that's not how they were known. Now, at the end of the article, remember this. Paul Tripp's a counselor.

He knows about guilt. He says, what about you? How balanced has your gospel been? Hmm, provoking question, right?

Have you been an advocate for grace, but silent in the face of injustice? There's two things he's doing.

He's taking the gospel, pairing it with silence in the face, you're somehow not being faithful to the gospel if you were silent in the face of injustice.

So the gospel is something you do, apparently. But is this the kind of injustice that's like, oh, they broke

God's law, they stole a purse, they beat someone up, they said something vile? No, no. Have you been comfortable with the segregation of the

Christian community or a subtle personal prejudice? Segregation of the Christian community.

So if you go to a church because you like the theology, you have friends there, don't have any hatred towards people of different colors, but it is predominantly one ethnicity.

And there's another church in town that is predominantly another ethnicity. You should feel guilty for that. You should examine that.

You should put that under the microscope. This is what the social justice warriors want you to do. They want you, this is where they want the focus right now, loving your neighbor by wearing a mask for the common good.

So do what the government tells you to do, even if it's not lawful, even if it doesn't help, don't question.

You must do that. Number two, focus on the systemic quote -unquote racism in this country, in your own heart, if you're white, and then be part of the solution, which means reforming the police or disbanding the police or taking down historical artifacts and monuments,

I mean, in some cases, destroying property, I guess, but be part of that solution.

Don't question the violence associated with that, the many who have died in these protests.

You haven't even heard about most of those names. I mean, it's because the narrative is controlled. You will all remember the name of George Floyd, every single one of you.

You won't remember the names of the, there's so many others, like there's at least like 30 or 40 who have died in these protests.

And I stopped keeping track of all of it. I don't even remember all their names. I remember David Dorn, but the other day I was even watching, there was a protest and there was a young black kid who died in the protest.

The dad's at the funeral and he's just saying, black lives matter, huh? Basically, you hypocrites.

And so, there's things like that happening and you don't remember all those names and they don't want you to.

Focus on only one thing. Focus on the systemic oppression.

Focus on racism in your own heart. Are you an enemy or are you an ally?

Those are the only two questions. If you're an enemy, because you're passively white, you're racist because you're passively just letting the status quo continue.

Or are you an ally? Are you gonna be part of the solution to completely take down the hegemony, forward reparations, whatever the solution is?

Paul David Tripp in 2018, that's two years ago. I mean, he's playing right into this kind of stuff. This is where the microscope is, all right?

Now, it's not wrong to examine your heart, but examining it for things that aren't necessarily sinful, and then pairing this with the gospel somehow, you're not being faithful to the gospel.

I mean, Paul David Tripp knows what he's doing. I'll just put it that way. Now, a few things

I want you to look for as we're gonna play this video. Watch for subjectivity, experience -driven things.

Paul Tripp would never apply these, I don't think, at least, to principles, these principles in personal situations.

He wouldn't start saying that, well, you need to just listen to a story, accept it, lament, believe it, because your experience, you're not capable of examining that experience.

You must just accept it. He wouldn't do that with a husband and wife. He wouldn't say like, oh, husband and wife are in argument, they have disagreements.

You know, wife, you just need to listen to your husband, or actually, really, probably would be the opposite. Husband, you just need to listen to your wife, accept what she says, believe it, because that's not your set of experiences.

And then, I don't think he would go that direction. I think he'd probably try to bring the word of God in, bring some objectivity to the situation, say, yeah, we should listen, but we can also examine while we're listening, and we can, making sure your heart attitude is right while you're listening, so that you're not just critically examining, but you're also trying to see if there's anything legitimate.

I mean, look, this is just basic human interaction, like healthy human interaction, but it's also just biblical principles.

You can make sure that you hear both sides of a story, make sure that you're getting counsel before making big decisions, two or three witnesses.

I mean, due process in our courts comes from biblical principles, essentially. And so,

I don't think he'd accept this, but this is what you're gonna see in this video,

I think, a lot of, is just this subjectivity, that it's a given that there's these experiences that you should just listen to, promote, believe.

Also, watch how he uses scripture throughout. He will use it, but watch where the priority it has, especially as compared to storytelling.

Now, I wanna read this for you. This is from Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado, and it's in a section on counter -storytelling, counter -storytelling.

So, just a review here of postmodernism. Postmodern people do not like what they call meta -narratives, these overarching narratives that explain, that are paradigms for understanding the world that you live in.

I mean, that's really the hegemony. They are responsible, they're oppressor people for these narratives.

And what critical theorists wanna do is they wanna bring in counter -narratives. And this isn't just critical theory. I mean, this is before the critical race theory that we think of even today.

This is just the new left thinking. This is Marxist thinking. It's really what it is at the base. But it's postmodern.

It's Marxist and it's postmodern. It's taking the established classes, right, who control things and their version of truth, and then ripping that down.

And so, this is what he says, Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado. He says that some of the critical storytellers believe that stories also have a valid destructive function.

Society constructs the social world through a series of tacit agreements mediated by pictures, images, pictures, tales, blog postings, and other scripts.

Much of what we believe is ridiculous, self -serving or cruel, but it is not perceived to be so at the time. Attacking embedded preconceptions that marginalize others or conceal their humanity is a legitimate function of all function.

So, this has gotten into legal theory and pedagogy, but this is the idea that we should, stories, instead of cross -examinations, we just need to listen to narratives.

Narratives are how Critical Race Theory advances. And you see this so clearly in what's happening right now in this country.

You must focus on the one story, the only story that matters. You must focus on what happened with George Floyd.

You must focus on what happened with Ahmaud Arbery. There are certain stories, and whipping out statistics and facts and examining those things,

I mean, things that Thomas Sowell does so well, that's not the point. Don't focus on that. Focus on the story.

And so, Critical Race Theory, those who have been behind that, I mean, this is part of their strategy.

And this is a question in the book, Critical Race Theory. If one wanted to change another person's mind about something, say, the death penalty, what would be a more effective?

An array of statistics or a good story or a movie? You can answer that one for yourself.

I know the answer, especially in our culture. Good story or movie.

It's not about facts. It's not about trying to take all the information you possibly can to create a paradigm to get a clear picture of what's happening so that you can even see if it's possible to amend a disparity or a situation.

No. Focus on one story, two stories, three stories. Stories that you have emotional connections with.

You don't have an emotional connection with a graph. But if the media and Hollywood and elites in education, if they're the ones responsible for crafting the stories, for platforming the stories, you know what kind of stories they're gonna platform.

It's gonna be stories that fit the narrative that they want. And the narrative will drive the change that they're looking for.

All right, so that's just, I just wanna mention that before we get to this video.

Because I think it's important to understand even Christians, the persons who aren't reading necessarily critical race theory, but Christians are being sucked into this like everyone else.

It's the narrative that matters, not necessarily objective truth. All right, I'm gonna play the video that Paul David Tripp put out yesterday.

I'm gonna do it at 1 .2 speed just to get through it a little faster. Here we go. If change is gonna take place, change takes action.

Action requires compassion. And compassion requires information.

All right, let's stop right there. Just one minor thing. I agree for the most part with what he's saying.

Here's the minor thing though that I quibble with just a little bit. In a justice system, right?

Or even personally, if we're just applying the law of God, you should not be motivated to pick winners or losers or treat people differently or do anything different for one demographic or group because of compassion.

Compassion is good. I mean, Jesus was moved with compassion. He healed people, charity, et cetera.

But when we look at actual justice, right? Equity in the biblical sense.

Applying the law of God to everyone, the responsibilities that we all have, the duties that God has given us, that should be applied regardless of your relationship with that person, whether they're an enemy, whether they're a foreigner and you could take advantage of them, whether they're poor, scripture even says that.

Don't favor a poor man in a dispute. If they're a relative of yours, no, no. Those groups, those external identities, you shouldn't look at those things when you're doing justice.

So if it's injustice we're talking about, justice specifically, that word, mishpat, if we're talking about that, then compassion shouldn't be the main driver.

It shouldn't be. And I know that sounds terrible. Compassion is good. God gave us compassion. But that's a lame, that is an issue that compassion shouldn't be the main driving force.

Faithfully applying just laws, right laws to situations should be the right thing to do.

That should be what we ought to look at if there's a problem in any way. And we should be looking at problems that are actually problems.

Sometimes the problems, a disparity doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem that you can even do anything about.

Maybe other factors. So I just wanna say that off the top.

It's not wrong, especially in situations where, I mean, look, he's a biblical counselor.

So if you're, you know, husbands are supposed to love their wives. We're supposed to, you know, we have responsibilities at home that we need to fulfill.

But we also should be, we should practice a kind of compassion towards people who are oppressed, towards people who are hurt, towards even animals.

This is a Christian thing to do. And we exert ourselves. We go the extra mile.

We participate in charity. We give of ourselves. I mean, this is, even if your enemy wants from you, you should give to your enemy.

I mean, this is, these are very Christian understandings. But this is not in the same category as justice.

That, you know, if you do that, it's not, you're not doing that kind of justice with them, to them.

So there's a distinction here. And I'm afraid that I think the waters get muddied on this because look, once you bring up compassion, emotions get involved.

Once emotions get involved, it's whoever can pull those heartstrings the hardest gets to win and, you know, create their situation or you support their, the situation they want to create.

And that's not how we should be thinking about issues related to justice specifically. All right, let's keep going with this.

A church that does not exist to reclaim heathenism, to fight evil, to destroy error, to put down falsehood.

A church that does not exist to take the side of the poor, to denounce injustice and to hold up righteousness is a church that has no right to be.

Not for yourself, oh church, do you exist any more than Christ existed for himself.

All right, let's keep going. This is Charles Spurgeon quote. Let's examine this real quick.

So if you look at this from a social justice angle, a presentist lens and you, you know, side of the poor, that must mean, you know, the people, we just gotta always politically do something right for the poor, economically do something right for the poor.

No, no, no, no. Usually when scripture is talking about that, cause scripture specifically says not to take the side of the poor, but when it, but it also talks about taking the side of the poor and whenever it does, it's because there are people, there are poor people that do not have the influence, do not have the power, do not have, they can be taken advantage of.

You don't have the connections, right? And so making sure that justice applies to them is taking the side of the poor.

Not subverting justice for the poor, right? But making sure the same equality before the law, the same laws that apply to someone who's rich ought to apply to someone who's poor.

If a rich person breaks the law, they gotta, they ought to go to jail. If a poor person breaks the law, they ought to go to jail. If it's the same offense, same kind of penalty.

That's the issue. Not, not, not what social justice advocates have made this to be, that you should just in general, kind of this feel, feely good, really ambiguous thing, just in general, be on the side of the poor.

If they're protesting something, be with them. No, that is not at all what the scripture talks about.

And that's not what Charles Spurgeon's talking about. The word injustice. Spurgeon did not mean the kind of injustice social justice advocates are advocating for.

There's a disparity. Well, we gotta create an equal outcome where we're gonna make sure that historic, you know, oppression is taken into account.

No, Spurgeon wasn't talking about that. And so this is, I think, a bad case of presentism trying to use

Spurgeon to legitimize what he's about to say. All Spurgeon. I have been wanting to do a video addressing this moment that we're in culturally.

And I sort of wanted for the, to let the dust settle a little bit. And I wanna begin by saying that I really want to address my white brothers and sisters who love the word of God, who love the gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ. And I wanna start by sharing two experiences with you.

The first is my own personal experience of ministry. For decades,

I have committed myself to this mission, connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life.

Take that narrative of scripture with its chief character being the

Lord Jesus Christ, the chief event being the cross of his sacrifice, and apply that to daily life.

I think of my ministry as putting on gospel glasses and trying to look at everything. Now, here's my experience.

When I have done that and applied that mission to marriage and parenting, to midlife, to sex, to money, to human communication, to a variety of issues, people are just so encouraging and tell me how thankful they are for my ministry.

But when I apply the very same mission, looking at the issue of racial injustice from the vantage point of the same message of scripture, the same gospel, people get mad at me.

They accuse me of forsaking my calling. They call me a socialist or a

Marxist. All right, let's stop right there. Here's what's happening.

Number one, he starts off with, it sounds like a confrontation of white Christians specifically.

So he wants to make his audience clear they're white Christians. He's talking about the current cultural moments of the

Black Lives Matter protests, et cetera. And he's going to start off not with biblical truth, and here's where you send white

Christians, but he's starting out with experiences he's had. Now, that's not necessarily a wrong thing to do.

What matters is where does that measure in? How authoritative is that?

And you're gonna see the emphasis, I think, in this video. It's more authoritative. His experiences seem to be the more authoritative thing he's appealing to.

Now, his claim is that he preaches the gospel. He has the gospel lenses. And by the way,

I gotta say this about him. He's got pretty spiffy glasses, but more spiffy than that, his mustache and his sideburns.

I think my wife would kill me, but I wouldn't mind having his mustache and sideburns. They're pretty nice.

That's just me. Anyway, squirrel. Back to reality. He's saying,

I just apply the gospel to all these relationships. I counsel. I talk about marriage and money and finances and family, and then all for some reason, they just do the same thing when it comes to the social justice stuff.

What does he call it? He calls it racial discrimination or oppression or whatever the term he used.

But he's saying, when I talk about that issue, then people say, yeah, you're a Marxist. What's going on here?

And here's what I think is happening. I mentioned earlier, he approaches, from what

I've seen, at least, he approaches other relationships with, you have your story, I have my story.

Let's try, let's listen to each other. Let's figure out, try to bring objective truth to bear, bring the scriptures to bear, principles, and then pave a way forward, right?

Conflict resolution. Is he doing that with this situation, right?

Think about it this way, and I'm gonna just give you a scenario to you. If a child said, or I'm gonna try to pick someone with less power, a child, let's say a wife and a husband.

Let's say the wife has less, she's not as strong, whatever. She says, the child says,

I'm oppressed. Or a friend says, I'm oppressed by that person. I'm oppressed by them.

And then they don't really give evidence for why they're oppressed. It's more so just, it's their experience.

They say, well, he never, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna get in trouble if I start, because people are gonna say, oh, you're paralleling something that's trivial with something very serious, and I don't wanna do that.

But just, you can paint the scenario in your head however you wanna paint it. It's just, there's an accusation made against someone.

How would a Christian counselor handle that? And then especially if the accusation ends with, and we need to do something to remedy this, and it's not about changing laws.

Paul Tripp knows this. I was just watching another video of his where he said, he said this in the video, that, yeah, you know, changing laws doesn't take away racism.

Racism's still there. You can change the laws, civil rights stuff, change the laws, but it didn't change the racism.

So especially when the solution to these things is we have to do something about it, but it's not changing laws that are, in the sense of, you know, forcing people to treat all ethnicities equally.

We have to do something extra. We have to do something more. And you know the kinds of things they're proposing, right? So put whatever scenario you wanna make.

You know, it's a wife with a husband. He's like, he does this, this, and this to me. And as a result,

I want compensation. I want, he needs to, here's my, here's what he has to do to make up for this.

And you paint that however you wanna paint it. Would Paul David Tripp or another Christian counselor come to that situation and just say, yep, you know, whatever she said, it's true.

You don't really have a say in this. And yeah, you need to, your job is just to lament, to examine yourself, to see if what she's saying is really true.

But you don't have a voice to even defend yourself. You can't give a counter -narrative.

And furthermore, you do need to pay her. You need to do something to right these inequities. Paul David Tripp would never do that in a personal relationship.

So if he, it seems like he's starting to go that direction with this issue, it's different. He's the one that's inconsistent, in my opinion.

And I think that's what people are pointing out. So he thinks he's consistent still, and I don't.

And one of the interesting responses that I've had is people say, well, what about?

What about this person's background? What about abortion? And here's the issue for me.

When you are addressing an area of sin, there are no whatabouts.

Wrong is wrong. Sin is sin. All right, he has not defined exactly what the sin is.

Of course, it's something related to systemic racism, something like that. But we don't know exactly what.

But he's saying, when you do that, when you talk about abortion, you say I should talk about that more, you're engaging in this whataboutism of some kind.

Here's why I think people, I know what response he's talking about. Here's why people make this response when they hear things that sound

Marxist. What they're saying is they don't actually buy the narrative. So put yourself back in the situation of the husband and wife or the friend, and the wife is saying, this is what he does to me, and I demand that he lament, and I demand that he listen to me now, and platform me, and give me this, and then me, me, me, me.

If the wife does that, right, and you don't think she's failed when it comes to evidence.

She hasn't produced enough evidence. She hasn't shown that this is what's actually happening. There's other problems with this, but that's the first problem, let's say.

Then let's say there is a problem. Let's say the husband, let's say he ignores the wife.

He actually does do something that's harmful. He ignores, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows. Yeah, she'll talk to him in public, and he just ignores her.

Then if that story came out, and there's a counselor sitting there, he'd probably say, well, look, here's something we all agree on.

Here's something we know. Here's something that today, right now, we can all say, we can all come around and say, this is true that this is the case.

This husband does not talk to his wife, or he ignores his wife. Let's start with that, right?

That's what people are saying when they bring up abortion. They're saying that there's this narrative that white people are just so horrible, and the police are so horrible, and this is what's happening against the minorities in this country, and this is so horrible, so horrible, and that's contested.

It's contested that these things are happening, especially today, that there is systemic racism.

I've done videos on it. You can go to my YouTube channel and search, systemic racism, or whatever. I just went through two hours of the

Phil Bisher video that he put out and showed you why it was inaccurate. Disparities don't mean that there's injustice, necessarily.

We know that abortion's happening. We know that Margaret Sanger wanted abortionists to be in these inner city areas to specifically reduce the population of black people, and we see that playing out in statistics, and we know abortion's against God's law anyway.

Why not talk about abortion? That's literally the biggest injustice, and it's a real injustice.

It's not contested. We all agree, right? That's kind of, I think, the attitude that Christians who say, well, why don't you talk about abortion?

That's what they're appealing to, all right? So it's not whataboutism at all.

It's saying, look, why don't we focus on something that's much worse, if we wanna talk about abortion versus quote -unquote police brutality, and something that we actually agree with you is a problem, right?

That's where that's coming from. And I don't think people would say that to me if I were addressing the sin of adultery.

I don't think I'd get responses, well, what about stealing? Why aren't you talking about stealing? I wonder why that whatabout response is there.

Let's take the abortion issue. I think that's... Okay, so, so here's, again, this is a straw man.

He's saying, well, if I was talking about one sin, you wouldn't bring up another sin. That's off topic. Well, no, no, no, that's not what's going on here.

You could be bringing up something like police brutality or systemic injustice of some kind, and there's a group of people who say, yeah, that's not really, that's not really...

So yeah, there's policemen that do police brutality, but if you're talking about a systemic issue across the country of millions of people, no, that's actually not a problem where we're capable of addressing, especially in the way you wanna address it.

And it's not something... We don't see the sin there. That's the issue. That's the root issue. It's not like he's bringing up a sin and people are like, well, we don't care about that sin.

That's not what's happening. People are saying, what you're bringing up, I don't think is a sin. That's a much different response.

But we know that abortion is a sin and it's related to what you're bringing up. It's sort of related.

Maybe we should talk about that. That's the kind of conversation that people are having when they bring up abortion.

Let's keep going. A horrible cultural sin, and I've spoken to it.

I marched in some of the early protests, marched in Washington.

It's wrong. It's a scourge on our culture. But so is racial injustice.

As I was thinking of this video, I thought of a second experience. Several years ago,

Llewellyn and I began to attend Epiphany Fellowship Church. It's a largely

African -American church. I would imagine that there are 75 or 80 % of the congregation is populated by our black brothers and sisters.

Epiphany will always be a bit of a multicultural church, but it's a predominantly black church.

It has been a transforming experience for us because we have listened to the experiences of brothers and sisters that we have come to love dearly.

This is our family. And we have heard things way outside of our personal field of experience.

We've heard of moms and dads who've had to have conversations with their sons and daughters that we never had to have with our children.

We've heard experiences of injustice that have made us weep, weep in a way that doesn't allow us to be silent any longer.

And when events happen where that injustice is clear, it now hurts us like it's our people.

These are, this is our family that we love. I know I will never experience these things like one of my black brothers do, but our hearts have changed.

We have been exposed and we have been convicted and we have been changed and that change is still taking place.

We're deeply grateful. We didn't go to Epiphany for this reason. We went because we knew that we would hear the gospel up one side and down the other because the heart of that ministry is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I heard my pastor, Dr. Eric Mason, speak once on 1 Corinthians 15 on the resurrection.

It was one of the best sermons I've ever heard in my life. All right, let's stop there.

What he is explaining is becoming woke. He's had a conversion of sorts by going to Eric Mason's church.

And don't miss it. It's because of a narrative. It's because stories he heard. It's because of what he noticed in that church, people who would raise their kids in a different way, tell them to watch out,

I'm assuming for the police and that kind of thing. Now, he set this whole video up as him talking about present things happening, the current cultural climate.

It's George Floyd, it's the Ahmaud Arbery, it's all of that. So he's connecting these things.

He's saying, it's not laws, all right? It's not individual people necessarily.

It's a system. It's a system. It's the system of white supremacy, system of policing, system of laws.

That's the boogeyman. That's the horrible thing. And there's sin in this system. And evidence for that is what the experiences that people have told me about going to this church.

Now, there could be other things. It's possible, yeah, it's possible. I mean, I think, where is he,

Philadelphia? I think maybe it is possible that there's some racism there. I don't know.

I don't live there. But you do, it is good to have evidence for it at least. He's connecting this with things like the

George Floyd situation and saying, yeah, this is, when that happens, I look at that and I just, I weep with the brothers that I know now.

I'm not, I don't, I'm not black, so I don't hurt in the same way, but I weep with them because I love them now.

And they're connecting this with their experiences. And so he doesn't take into account things like conditioning,

I mean, there's people who do things, not because, I know several people that they take precautions that I would not take because they're afraid of certain things happening that I am not afraid of.

My wife is actually one of them, interestingly enough. She has gotten me to lock things more now because I hardly ever,

I still, I don't lock much. I just never, I wasn't afraid of people taking my stuff as much. My wife, who's also white, was afraid of that.

And she locks everything. I don't know how many times I've been locked out of the house, because I'm just not thinking about it.

And there's, it's the way she was raised. It's the culture she was raised in. It's the things that she learned. It's, and there was experiences that caused her, look,

I, when I go hiking, I am much more cautious of going near cliffs because I had a friend, a good close friend of mine who passed away because he fell off of a cliff.

It was one of the most sad things in my entire life. That affected me.

That makes me more cautious than I used to be. So, so yeah, it's possible that some of these things, they could be caused by experience, negative experiences, but there's also, you gotta take this into account too.

There's also a narrative being pushed by every single institution in the culture.

Every single one, just about. It's being pushed now by the church, but it was before that, the media, liberal establishment and education,

Democratic Party, entertainment in general. I mean, this narrative that America's white supremacist from the beginning still is.

It's this nameless, faceless, invisible white supremacy still exists even after laws were passed to try to get rid of it.

It's just, it's just horrible. That's what America is, essentially. And if you hear that a lot, if that's what you think, you're gonna, look, if you grew up as a kid,

I remember I had a cousin who did this, would tell me these scary stories about these monsters.

Well, there were no monsters, but did I take precautions? You better believe I took precautions. I was afraid.

These monsters would eat little boys in the afternoon, especially if they were in the swimming pool. Our family didn't have a, we had one of those little kiddie things.

We didn't have money to have a swimming pool, but, you know, oh man, I was afraid when I was like five or six. And there was nothing to be afraid of.

It was a story that I was given. So conditioning plays a part in this. Culture plays a part in this.

There's all sorts of things that can play a part in that, this kind of thing. Where you live plays a part in it.

There's more crime where you live. If you live around people who don't follow God's law, then of course you're gonna experience more hardship from the sin of others.

If you live in Florida, you're gonna have hurricanes, right? So this doesn't prove that there's systemic injustice.

It's sin. And we just need to accept that narrative and then go do something about it.

It's all, to do something about it always follows. It's not enough just to lament that there's a situation.

You must believe as if it's an orthodox position of some kind, and then you must do something.

To stop it. And it's not enough to, we can't say, oh, damn,

Derek Chauvin, he was bad egg, bad cop. Good thing he's out of there.

No, that's not enough. Because you gotta understand, this is a whole system. This is, it wasn't

Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd. It was the system of white supremacy, which white people are complicit in, which white people constructed to benefit themselves, which white people are still benefiting from, and that's the real sin.

That's the sin. That's what, and that's what he's talking about. He got woke to this. And you can go to some of my other videos on disparities and I talk about, you could slice this pie in all sorts of different directions.

You can make a case, and of course, no one would wanna make this case today, but if you look at police shootings and incarceration rates and a lot of the things that get brought up to say, oh, this is an example of systemic racism, you could actually make the case that, no, actually, it's discrimination against, quote unquote, white people.

And some people have made that case, but you don't hear me making it here. I'm just saying that you can do all kinds of things with experiences and statistics and, and so this isn't biblically -rooted stuff.

This isn't biblically -rooted stuff. This is stuff that is coming from a new left understanding of America and what it is.

And I don't know if he recognizes it. I don't know if he sees it, but we sure do. So let's keep playing this.

The man spoke on the whole chapter. That in itself blew my mind. That's what got us there.

But as we've been there, God has opened our hearts to issues of injustice that are profoundly important.

Now, here's what I think is important we want to ground our thinking in this issue in the word of God.

And as I thought about that, I thought of just two passages, one in the Old Testament, one in the

New Testament. My mind first went to Amos 6, where God is railing against the leadership of Israel.

And he says, you lie on your ivory beds. You drink wine out of bowls.

You have so much time on your hand that you invent musical instruments to entertain yourself. Now, I don't know if you're catching what's going on here, but if you're lying on an ivory bed and you're drinking wine out of big bowls and you're inventing musical instruments because you've got the time to do that, you are an affluent, privileged person.

So now he's going to go to scripture, which is good. He's going to talk about systemic oppression, not in the legal code, not in individuals necessarily, but it's systemic.

It's accumulation of this power and the accumulated actions over time of a certain group of people, white people,

I guess. And he goes to Amos 6 to talk about this. And he says they're privileged as if that's a really bad thing.

Amos is about the judgment against Israel. It's apocalyptic. Israel has done some horrible things.

And part of that is they were characterized by oppressing the poor. That is in there. And you can have people who are characterized by being selfish.

And this would be not equitable, right? This would be injustice, a real injustice, is they're treating certain people differently than they treat others.

It's not a fair price. It's they specifically treat someone differently because of who they are.

And that's in there. But there's a lot of other things in there too. Idolatry is very prominent in Israel's sins.

In fact, that's the last sin before Amos 6, which is talked about. The gods that they have made for themselves.

Verse 26 of Amos 5. Now you get to Amos 6. And he's talking about all these kingdoms that God has judged.

He said, are you any better than them? Is Israel any better than these kingdoms? No. What makes you think you're gonna escape judgment?

And then the passage that he talks about. Those who recline on the beds of ivory, they sprawl on their couches, they eat lambs.

He even says in verse five, like David, they've composed songs for themselves. Was it wrong for David to compose songs?

No, privilege isn't a bad thing. It's not wrong to compose songs. It's not wrong to have these things necessarily.

What's the problem here then? They anoint themselves with the finest of oils, yet, yet, they have not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.

Therefore, they will go into exile at the head of the exiles, and the sprawlers' banqueting will pass away.

He's saying, this is hypocrisy. This is, you guys are involved in sin up to your eyeballs.

You're breaking the law of God. You're breaking the covenant. And all you're focused on is yourself and your pleasure.

And he's saying, priorities are wrong. That's the problem here. The privilege isn't the problem. It's the priorities being off.

That's the problem. That's the actual sin here. He goes on. And then he says, you do all these things, but you're not concerned with the ruin of Joseph.

You're not concerned that the people around you are living in cultural, spiritual ruin.

You're not concerned with all the ravages of injustices that are part of that ruin.

You're not concerned. So I guess the implication here is that white

Christians, that's who he's called out. They're going on with their lives of privilege.

They're enjoying vacations. They're doing all kinds of things. And they just, they have no care, no concern for the injustice which they are inflicting, which they are, they didn't know that they were inflicting, but they are inflicting and it's happening all around them.

I mean, if we're gonna keep things consistent, that's what Amos is talking about. People who are, they are the, the people who are doing these things are the ones, it's not just that it's going on around them.

It's that they're the ones doing it. They're the idolaters who are selfishly just thinking about themselves and doing what they wanna do.

So this is what the parallel that Paul David Tripp is trying to make. He's like, hey, you white people,

I guess what he's saying is, you're the ones causing this, you're the problem. If we're gonna be consistent, that's what Amos is saying. So he's trying to get white

Christians then to see this as a problem, the systemic oppression going on.

And then I'm assuming do something about it. It's a reminder that we do not have the ability to not be concerned about what doesn't touch us.

Yeah, but again, the point is that this, the oppression here, it's not oppression, the sin and oppression.

I mean, that was happening, I guess, those who were causing the oppression were the same people who were living in this, this hypocrisy, who were writing the songs.

And really, the sense is that life was going on as normal. That's the sense. You're enjoying all these things, you're living your life, but you're not obeying the law of God, right?

That's the actual problem is you're continuing to live life and participate in all these extra activities, which aren't necessary for life when you're ignoring the things that God actually said you should do.

That's the issue here. That's the context, that's what Amos 6 is talking about.

See, love your neighbor as yourself means I will give myself to concerns about things that are distant from my experience because I want that person to be loved as I would love myself.

What do you mean about distance from your experience? If you're, things that you have no knowledge of,

I mean, you can only be concerned about things you have knowledge of. And that knowledge can come from other people telling you about it.

And you can love those people, but if someone has something stolen, you can give to them. You can replace that item, even if you weren't there to see it or be part of the initial reaction to the theft.

But what does he mean? Things that are distant, that you'll never experience, that you can't really possibly ever understand, that you must accept because it's just been told to you without any critical examination whatsoever.

The second path I thought of was Christ railing against the

Pharisees. This is Matthew 23, 23. And he says, you tithe a 10th of the mint and dill and cumin in your garden, but you have forsaken, you have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

Again, what's the problem here? They took their own laws and they put them above the law of God. They followed their own little rules and felt self -righteous because of it, but they didn't take care of their own parents because they would offer their money up as Corbin, it would be called.

And they were hypocrites in just every single way, laying all these burdens on people that they wouldn't lift a finger to meet themselves.

And so Jesus indicts him. He says, you're hypocrites because you're not actually following the law of God. And you don't have the motivation to follow your little laws.

You don't have the proper motivation that you're supposed to have when you're following God, the law of God.

So your motives are off, your actions are off. You're hypocrites. And I guess that's exactly what we are being told right now by Paul David Tripp.

I guess white Christians, they have the same problem. They're so concerned with their own laws.

I don't know what those would be, but they don't care about weightier matters, law of the law, justice, and mercy, and faithfulness.

And of course, these are real principles. These are the motivating factors behind the laws that are given, but God still defines the laws that are given.

He defines what's right and wrong. We don't get to do that ourselves. So you're not finding that, he's not saying, oh, the

Pharisees just, they didn't properly lament their religious privilege. No, they needed to sit in time out for a little while and just lament and weep about it.

And no, he's saying, you guys, you're not following the law. You should follow the law. There's an actual law, not an invisible systemic thing.

No, an actual law, you're not following it. So these are the passages though that, for a guy who has written all these books, it's just amazing to me that his arguments here seem just so weak.

Jesus calls justice, mercy, and faithfulness. This is our savior.

This is the hero of the story. This is the epicenter. This is the one into whom we are being formed into his likeness.

This is the one who says the weightier matters of the law are justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

You see, here's God's plan. Until we are on the other side in the new heavens and new earth where perfect justice will reign in righteousness forever, here's the plan.

We are called to be God's ambassadors. And that means

God makes his invisible justice visible by sending people of justice to stand for, to defend people who are experiencing injustice.

Would those be the social justice warriors? Is that who that is?

Who are these people? These are the protesters? Who are you talking about? So Christians, he thinks, are supposed to be doing this somehow, but what does it even look like?

Again, he uses the terms. It happens all the time. Use these terms, justice, justice, justice, but never giving precise biblical definition to what exactly he means by that.

And that's where, and it's all smuggled in under words like that. And so it's hidden. You can't get at it because you're operating with a different understanding of justice than he's operating under.

Life between the already and the not yet is ambassadorial.

I'm always in every way called to represent the message, the method, and the character of the

King. And justice is close to the heart of our savior

King. Now here's what has hit me as I've had these experiences over the last couple of years, that change in this area of racial injustice, which has so marked our culture, so marked the unique experience of blacks in America from 1619 to 2020.

If change is gonna take place, change takes action. Did you catch that?

1619 to 2020. This is the tip of the hat to the 1619 project, I think. So you can see what he's being influenced by.

This is, I mean, no one talked about that. That, I mean, unless you're in some maybe academic circle for more liberal minded professors, people didn't talk about that.

That is just 1619 to the present. You know, it was kind of like this, just this narrative of injustice. And so just a little clue to maybe what he's being influenced by.

Action requires compassion and compassion requires information.

I say all the time that human beings made the image of God do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts.

And so if you're hearing about the experience of another person from a distance, and you hear words that are similar than of the words that you use, and you don't unpack that person's experience, so you really understand what they're saying, what they're experiencing, you will interpret those things out of your own experience.

And in a sense, we do that when we start trying to take biblical understanding of justice, a legal biblical understanding of justice, and then think that that's what

Paul Tripp is talking about here, because it's evident that he's not. Now, it's interesting what he just said about we don't, it's our interpretation.

So he's saying there's basically a lens we interpret everything by, and that's what affects how we live. It's not necessarily the facts.

It's not, that's not entirely true. You can, there's a kernel of truth in that.

You can have an event happen to you, and it affects the way you live.

I mean, a lot of times you will bring up like the two sons, right, who had an alcoholic father. One of them is an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic.

The other one is not an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic. Same experience, different decisions, because of the way that they interpreted that.

One of them said, I wanna be like my dad, and the other one said, yeah, I don't wanna be like my dad, right? So it's more complicated than that,

I'm sure, but yeah, to a certain extent, there's some truth here, but there's also a sense in which you, it doesn't matter how you interpret some things.

They're just gonna affect you. It doesn't matter. You could think of them positively or negatively, and it's just the truth is going to come to bear.

If you break the law, if you actually break the law, and you get caught, and there's a penalty for it, and you go to prison,

I mean, that's, you're being hit with the facts right there. The fact of the situation is you are in prison, and yeah, you have some limited control over how you respond to that, but you don't get to decide what's actually going to take place.

So yeah, facts do matter, but my concern is that what he's starting to do is slip in that subjectivity, right?

That you need to be informed. You need to have, you need information, information. So is this information, though, objective information, like real information, things that are the case, that there is systemic bias?

This is the case. We need to react to that, or is this something that's not, yeah, it's not. It's just interpretations by a certain community or group of people, and you just need to accept that.

I think we're gonna find out as we go through this more. And you will hear the words, but it's sort of like this.

You will add two and two together and get five. Because you will put your experience on that person's experience.

And what almost often happens, always happens. That's kind of a terrible example. You'll add two to two and two together and get five.

That's an objective reality. Two and two equals not five. Two and two equals four.

That's objective. That's true no matter where you are. I mean, it's universal. It's absolute.

It's unchanging. It's a truth that comes from God, right? Mathematical relationship. So I think what he's trying to say is just that there's a receiver problem if you're not understanding how someone...

So if someone has an experience and you haven't had that experience, right? Say it's somebody who's a minority and they have experience with the police and you haven't had that experience, you don't understand.

You don't have the kind of knowledge. You have maybe some OIDA knowledge, but not some

Gnosko knowledge. You understand that it happened. You don't understand how it felt or that kind of thing.

It's not the same as an objective reality of two plus two. That equals four. And you can communicate that to anyone no matter what cultural quote unquote lens they might have.

When we do that is we end up minimizing the reality of that other person's experience because you just haven't come to understand it.

So here's what I wanna say to you, say to my white brothers and sisters. Before we get there, it's like minimizing experiences is a sin.

You should never minimize an experience. Well, is it an experience like two... If you have an experience with two plus two equaling four, that is a legitimate experience.

You can prove it to someone. That's the example he used. If this is the experience of just like, well, it's just, it stinks to be me in this world.

It stinks to be someone that looks like me or acts like me or lives in the community I live in. It just is terrible. And here's all the set of experiences.

That's on a different level. But if we don't heed that, if we don't react to that somehow, or if we question that interpretation, because it could be subjective.

It could be an interpretation that maybe they're creating their own bed they're living in. Who knows, who knows, right? In some circumstance, maybe sometimes you can verify it, sometimes you can't.

But if you question it, it's almost seemed like that's a sin. You can never minimize something that's oppression.

I've run into this a bunch of different things. It's orthodoxy now.

You must believe that certain things that have happened to certain minorities, whether that's sexual orientation or gender or race, et cetera.

If you don't believe that the way they've been treated is the worst possible way in every single way imaginable, then it's like you're committing, you're breaking a law.

You're committing heresy, you're sinning. You may not ever minimize. Even if you bring facts to bear and you bring, hey, here's what the conditions were like for this kind of demographic in this situation.

Nope, not allowed to do it. And that's concerning because that means you can't bring your two plus two is four into the conversation.

And if it's objective, you should be able to, right? I love you. I love the church of Jesus Christ.

I love the gospel of Jesus Christ. I've given my life to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I love the body of Christ.

I love every word in the Bible from the very first word to the very last word.

I would have nothing to offer if it weren't for the gospel. But what

I want to say to you is this is what motivates me to say, please care enough about this issue of racial injustice to become informed.

I'm gonna ask you to do four things to get informed.

First, just get out your phone or your iPad or your computer and Google the

Bible and justice and read the volume of passages on this issue.

This is one of your Bible's most dominant themes because a

God of perfect justice will not be silent in the face of a multitude of injustices that a sin broken world will create.

That's a good advice, right? Go to your Bible and look these things up. Now, as you're doing it though, as you're doing it, you wanna make sure you're understanding there's different Hebrew words, different Greek words that are used.

And there's different, the overwhelming way that the word mishpat that's used in the

Old Testament overwhelmingly refers to a legal kind of justice, equality before the law.

But there's also senses in which the terms translated justice, even mishpat, can be used in a way that's talking about the justice that you do as an individual to others.

There's doing justice, it's righteously treating someone, treating someone, not treating them differently because of external features, but treating them in a way that's righteous.

And of course, it's the same principle, I guess, when you take that into the courtroom. But a lot of the times what

I've noticed is there's passages where the original audience understood what this meant, doing justice, right?

They understood what that meant. But we take our modern, present understandings of what that means, and we read it back.

And that's what I would say, that's what I think Paul Tripp needs to warn about, is like, as you're doing this, make sure you're doing it in context, understanding what justice means, not just looking up verses on justice, but yeah, do a real study, get into what words mean.

Grab Strong's Concordance, perhaps, and find out, look at the first references in the scripture for terms translated justice, and try to get definitions for them.

So as you're going through, and you're finding just general statements about justice, you're not just bringing in all the baggage of maybe what you're understanding from the

English translation of justice used today in 2020, where everyone's, everyone is affected by new left understanding of justice, critical race theory, et cetera.

Make sure that you're understanding it in the context of the time. So I don't have anything to quibble with, really.

I just wish he would have added that little caveat. But here we go, here's where it gets good, though.

Listen to this. That's the first thing. Second thing

I wanna do is recommend three resources that have been produced by people who are committed to the gospel of the

Lord Jesus Christ. That's why I'm recommending these resources. I think they're each helpful in different ways.

The first one is a 17 -minute video done by Phil Vischer. He's the creator of VeggieTales called

Race in America. It is a brilliant video. The thing that's brilliant about this video is there's almost no opinion whatsoever.

In fact, I could say there's no opinion whatsoever in this video. This video is fact after fact after fact that is a bit mind -blowing.

Okay, hold on a minute, hold on a minute. This video, it's objective.

Notice how he's now bringing objectivity into it. This is objective, this video, right?

When we're communicating, we gotta be very careful because it could be two plus two is four because you just don't understand.

You don't have those experiences. You gotta listen to these other perspectives, these other experiences. But as soon as a Phil Vischer video on systemic injustice comes out, well, that, that is objective.

No arguing with it. It's just fact after fact after fact. Not opinions, not subjective, not just an experience.

These are rock solid. And of course, if you watch this channel for any length of time, you'll know a few weeks ago,

I took almost two hours and I went through Phil Vischer's video. It is not fact after fact after fact.

It is a mess and it's presented very cleverly, but it is a mess.

It is not objective. And it shows, I mean, look, this is Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, same book that was, it's in the

Radical Library in Richmond or it was a few weeks ago that they set up to show this is why we're taking down and vandalizing these monuments and writing profanity and want, you know, everything that we're doing, damaging private property and public property.

This is the same book that Sojourners recommends. This is, there's even critical race theory presented in the book, at least they quote critical race theorists.

And it's very dubious. And there have been, I think National Review had a pretty good article about it.

But this is the one, this is the book that Phil Vischer's basing most of his research on. And now you have, you have

Paul Tripp wanting to take that video, which this is actually a good illustration.

I could bring this up now or a good example. Most of the people, like if you look at even

Phil Vischer, or if you look at, in this case, now we're talking about Paul Tripp, they're not

Marxists in the sense that they're going and reading Marx. They're just not. And they get very sensitive about it.

You heard that in the videos. People just call me a Marxist because I care about justice. You hear this all the time. And it's boring at this point because the reality is they go back to someone who goes back to someone who goes back to someone who eventually you're gonna wind up with a

Marxist tradition. It goes back to Marx somehow. In this case, you can see the line, okay?

Goes to Phil Vischer. Phil Vischer, Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander. Michelle Alexander, critical race theory. Critical race theory, oh, now we're going back to Marxism.

Frankfurt School, Marxism. It's the same. Because you didn't directly get it from Karl Marx doesn't mean you're not being affected by Marxism.

So I wanted to make that point. But it's just, it's a little interesting that all of a sudden the objectivity comes in when we're talking about this

Phil Vischer video. Let's bring this to a close here. Characterizing the black experience in America.

The second resource is by my pastor,

Eric Mason. It's called Woke Church. Now I'm aware that woke language has become very controversial and some of you will react against that just because of the title.

It's an extremely helpful book actually. And you may not. Actually it's not. And later this week,

I may upload it next week. We'll see, maybe this Friday. But I will, we will be doing a whole episode on Woke Church, that book.

No, it's not a helpful book. It is a Marxist book. I agree with everything in the book.

But even if you can't find your way to read the whole book, at least read the brilliant forewords.

There's two forewords in this book by John Perkins and Lincoln Duncan. Those together are incredible.

I would plead with you, read the whole book. The third resource is by Jamar Tisby.

He's a historian. And it's called The Color of Compromise.

And it just traces the history of the complicity of the Church of Jesus Christ in this issue.

So four things. If you wanna know more about Jamar Tisby, you can check out this

YouTube channel if you're watching on YouTube. Or if listening on a podcast, I'm sure it's on whatever podcast service you're using.

But there are two episodes on Jamar Tisby. One, an interview with the chair of the

History Department at Liberty University, Samuel Smith. And he talks about why he thinks Jamar Tisby's approach is dangerous.

And then another one, I did an interview with actually my brother for about an hour.

And we talked about The Color of Compromise and the issues with it. So you can go check those out.

There's also a really good review from RTS, one of the professors at Reform Theological Seminary did a pretty good review of Color of Compromise as well.

But yeah, not a good book. Plays very fast and loose.

Ignores things that don't fit the narrative. So would not recommend that book. Go to your Bible and do a biblical study of justice.

How can you represent the value of this in the heart of God as his ambassador, unless you're biblically informed?

Second, check out that 17 minute video, download

Woke Church and The Color of Compromise. Change is needed.

And change requires action. And action requires compassion and compassion requires information.

The White Church. We see the information part now.

The information is from these books, these skewed books, these wrong books. These books that paint are, they're trying to paint a picture that's not completely accurate.

That's the information. And that's where he finds, that's where he grounds the objectivity. That's the, you know, this is just the state of affairs.

It's just how it is. So if you're motivated by those things, if you're reading those things, then yeah, that is gonna motivate revolutionary action as it has done.

Does not have the liberty of being silent in the face of any cultural iniquity, no matter what it is.

And we should not be silent in this one too. I love the gospel of Jesus Christ. Did you catch that?

That's important. Church can't be silent in the face of any cultural inequity, any cultural inequity.

It makes me wonder, what's he gonna do when the wheel turns?

And now the same exact narrative, exact in every sense of the word, just about, is used to promote a revolution because of the way that Christians and, you know, the church is gonna be the biggest target,

America has systemically oppressed transgenders and sexual minorities.

What's he gonna do? I think I already know the answer because he said this. This is the grief of my heart.

We need to stop being haters. I think that it is biblically wrong, immoral to treat any human being as a sin on two legs, to use it as a title.

He's a homosexual. We don't say he's a pride. He's a greed.

We just, we don't do that. And yet we've given ourselves the liberty of treating this area like we treat no other area.

And so we've led with condemnation rather than leading with grace.

That was in 2015 that he said that. And interestingly, for someone who knows the Bible, I don't understand how he could miss this, but yeah, the

Bible uses that language. Homosexuals, effeminate, effeminates, depending on the translation, effeminate people, you know, all liars will have their part in a lake of fire.

I mean, the Bible constantly is talking about sins and it's just a basic grammatical issue you're having, like an

English grammatical issue. And you're saying, well, we just don't ever call anyone a greed, right? We call them thieves or covetous people, or look, you can say like, yeah, look, we need to have compassion.

And I have been in situations where, yeah, I have had the opportunity to show compassion and help people with these issues.

But look, this is, you don't just start saying, you know, we're gonna throw out biblical language in the name of being biblical.

It's the weirdest thing. And I understand this is a big blind spot. And the reason

I bring that video up from 2015 is because look, when the same exact narrative is used about homosexuality, he leaves himself open.

I don't know how in the world he's gonna defend himself or the church when that happens. This is why young people are leaving in some ways.

This is why they say they're leaving. I'll do a video and we'll talk about, you know, but they, look, they've been taught a different ethical code.

They've been taught equity and what he's talking about here, really, like any disparity, so anything inequitable is wrong, inclusion, diversity, and these are the right things.

And when they read their Bible, they find out, oh man, the Bible doesn't really support these things. In fact, the

Bible is very much, it's not the priority of scripture. It's not really part of God's law, not in the sense that they're thinking about it.

And so Paul Tripp, he's a lot like older guys, baby boomers, et cetera, who start to go woke.

He's like, they're not gonna reject all of Christianity. They're gonna still do Christianity, but they're gonna now, they're gonna emphasize anything they can, they can find that's like, you know, this is talking about this, getting rid of inequities and justice, et cetera.

That's what they're gonna do. The younger the person is, the more likely it seems, in my own estimation, to leave the church because they realize that, you know, they don't have the tradition, they're not as rooted in as many years as someone like Paul Tripp has been in church.

They'll just leave. They just, and they start asking questions that don't have easy answers to them.

They don't really actually even have answers. You know, if you say the Bible's supposed to be about, you know, love in the sense of getting rid of inequity and making sure no one feels bad, et cetera, et cetera.

And now, look, I'm reading about, even during the exodus, they're talking about God's commanding them to, how to incorporate slaves into celebrating the

Passover while they're escaping slavery and look at all the laws on slavery and look what Paul says about slavery.

Look what Paul says about women. Look at the parables that Jesus uses about wages and about slavery as well and about even torture and look, they had polygamy and look, you know, the list goes on and on.

And they're gonna, the young person looks at this and says, you're telling me this is all about equality and stopping injustice and equity and tolerance and diversity and I'm not seeing it here.

And this is the kind of thing that people like Paul Tripp, when they start saying this, this is, that's the,

I'm telling you, that's the reaction. That's the reaction and they're not always seeing it, probably, but that's, that is happening as well.

And so, yeah, I figured I'd show you that old video. Let's continue here with Paul Tripp.

We're at the end. And the reason my heart is exercising this moment is because of that Genesis to Revelation message.

I think we can do better. I think it's time to speak and to act, to live as ambassadors.

Act in what way? Act in what way? Reparations, he's not very specific.

You get this a lot from evangelicals. Join the revolution, but we're not gonna talk about the specifics of what this means.

Of the one who is perfectly holy in justice. God help us.

May we do that. A church that does not exist to reclaim heathenism, to fight evil, to destroy error, to put down.

All right, we're just repeating the Spurgeon quote here at the end. I'm gonna skip this. Obviously, we've gone way over the one hour that I said, yeah, it'll probably take maybe an hour.

And I knew when I said it, it wouldn't. But hopefully that was helpful for you in analyzing it. I just wanna briefly say at the end here,

I don't have a beef with Paul David Tripp at all. In fact, it makes me sad that this is happening.

This is someone that I thought, before 2018, was one of the better voices out there.

Even though I wasn't a huge fan of his writings, I just thought, yeah, I could recommend his books, I would think.

And now I'm just like, well, I guess not. I guess I wouldn't want them watching that video or getting that perspective.

And who knows where he's gonna go now? And that's the warning, is once you start going down this path and you marinate in this kind of thinking for years, it is like a conversion experience.

If I had the opportunity to talk to Paul David Tripp, I don't even know, the conversation would probably, he'd have a lot of understandings that I don't have and we'd probably spend a lot of time, and vice versa, defining terms.

What do you mean by justice? What do you mean? What's equity to you? What are you gonna do when this switches to homosexuality or another issue that the church is going to be in a crosshairs for?

What's your view on standpoint epistemology? You seem to favor it in some way.

I mean, we'd have just a tangled up web of things that we'd have to talk about if we were gonna try to reach an understanding of any kind.

And the best thing to do is not to go down this path from the beginning, to avoid that, to start warning people when they start going down it.

But once you're in this position, once someone thinks this way and they've marinated in it and they've read all these books that reinforce these ideas, the best thing you can probably do is just be a good example.

Show compassion where you can, like real compassion. I don't talk about doing this, but I do quite regularly.

Someone needs money and they're in my path. I pray that the Lord would provide opportunities for me to help others.

And when that happens, I do to the best of my ability. I do help people that are in need, and spiritual or physical.

And so be a good example, show what that looks like. Christians are some of the most generous people. And for us to bear the brunt of this, when we're probably the top givers in the country, just about for charitable causes, to bear the brunt and to say we lack compassion, that's the real problem is we just lack compassion.

That is slander, it's slander. So show by your good works, as scripture says, show by your good works that these accusations are not true.

Don't join in with the world and start making the same kind of accusations. I mean, the Paul trips go in that direction, joining in with the world as they're wagging the finger.

Yeah, I'll give you a lot of points with the world when you do it, but they'll turn on you in a split second. So hope this was helpful.

God bless. And by the end of the week, they should have another episode coming out and we'll probably be talking about Woke Church.

So stay tuned for that. Hopefully the world hangs together. And I think it will, as long as we have

Goya, Tostones chips and Cola champagne. So go ahead and go get those.