A Christian Pastor & Policeman Take on the Anti-Gun Lobby

Welcome, everyone, once again, to another edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, as always,

John Harris, and we have a special episode on gun control. And we're going to talk about what's going on, not just in the world as it were,

Matthew McConaughey just made this big speech, and people are clamoring for all kinds of restrictions.

But we're going to talk about what's happening also in the church or in evangelicalism, because we're getting some of the same talking points.

And so to help me discuss this, though, I've asked two people that I respect greatly.

First of all, we have Pastor Kerry Gordon. He's a pastor at Cornerstone World Outreach. He is also the producer of Enemies Within the

Church. And you can go check that out at enemieswithinthechurch .com. He's a third generation pastor, and he's got some cool stories we might hear about a little later on about his grandfather,

Dr. Mounts, who was the pistol packing preacher. And Pastor Kerry Gordon also packs when he's preaching, which not a lot of pastors do.

And then we have Mike Dolan. Mike Dolan was 36 years active as a police officer, and then he became a commander in special operations, an assistant security director in Colorado at some of the largest campuses there, and then also he's done grade school security.

And so both of you, thank you so much for joining me, and it is an honor. It's an honor to be here.

Thank you. Amen. Likewise. Well, I want to start with you, Pastor Kerry Gordon.

Just kind of an open -ended question here. You've seen some of, I think, what's going on, or at least you're familiar with the reaction when there's a school shooting that the media tends to focus on.

What are your just general thoughts? What do you think is being left out of the discussion?

And what do you wish Christians would be focusing on more than just the current clamoring for restrictions and all these kinds of things?

Well, that's a broad question. The greatest problem in our culture today in the

United States is statism, and that's the idea that the government gives permission for the individual to exist.

And somebody might hear me say that and think, well, what's wrong with the government gives permission for us for how fast we can drive, and the government gives permission for how we can do business contracts?

And that's exactly my point. They don't understand the nature of the universe that we live in, and that's most people, most countries, all of Europe, almost every continent on the planet, the vast majority of people, and sadly, even in the

United States today, the majority of our population in both parties are statists. They think the government gives permission for the individual to exist, and from that assumption stems every kind of liberty -crushing evil you can even conceive of.

Here's an example, abortion. The state gives permission for the individual to exist, and the state says, well, some people don't have the right to exist, and they're gone.

Euthanasia, physician -assisted suicide, passive euthanasia, which is a very sneaky thing that's going on in all of our hospitals right now.

One of the concerns about Obamacare, people, they would have like a death council, and there would be some vote from strangers in some hospital to decide whether you should live or die based on whether or not you were a productive member of society or the condition of living or, you know.

So all of this, including and especially the notion that you should not have the right to defend yourself, it all stems from the assumption that the state gives permission for the individual to exist.

In stark contrast, the beginning of our philosophy as Christians, as people who believe that the

Bible is the authoritative word of God, is not that the state gives permission for the individual to exist, but rather God gives permission for the individual to exist, and therefore the individual, sacredly created individual, gives permission for the government to exist.

Because after all, what is a government but an arrangement made by many individuals that pulled themselves together in a conglomeration and agreed upon certain contractual covenantal words by which they would govern themselves?

So there's a huge difference, and most evangelicals, most Christians begin their theology with a false humanist assumption that the state gives permission for the individual to exist, but then in the next breath, they will say, oh, but our rights come from God, and you'll hear them say both things, and it's a cognitive dissonance, and it's so beautifully explained in an understanding between the

Declaration and the Constitution and the minds that wrote those documents and signed those documents.

If you read the organic law of the United States, which is the Declaration, you find that we get our rights directly from our

Creator, and we, the people, give permission for the government to exist, and then that's the purpose statement.

Then the Constitution becomes basically an organizational document, not a grant or a rights -granting document.

I don't get my rights from the Constitution. I don't get my rights from the Declaration. I get them from God, and it says so in the organic law.

The Constitution is just a great big organizational document that tells the government what they are not allowed to do and lines they are not allowed to cross, but if you approach the

Declaration or the Constitution from the standpoint of the humanist, like most evangelicals in America today, most citizens, and you think, when you walk in the door to look at the document, the state gives permission for the individual to exist.

You literally cannot even read the document correctly. Your mind can't comprehend the purpose of the sentences and the

English language and how it was organized to communicate with you. Your mind can't even conceive of it.

So the reason why there's so much confusion is, ultimately, evangelicals don't have a biblical worldview, and they don't understand the deductive reasoning that the

Bible teaches. Number one, God gives me permission to exist, and therefore, since I am the first created being, humanity,

God sacredly created individuals, then permission for how we organize ourselves, obviously, comes from the individual.

So once you get that chain, that flow of who gives permission to who and where do my rights come from, then everything else just makes sense, and of course, then the individual has a right to defend themselves.

So what you're saying, and this is, I think, key and big, is that the starting point should be more basic than even the

Constitution or any of our documents. It is God himself and his law and how he has governed the universe and humanity in particular, and that is he gives them a responsibility to protect themselves and their families.

And so this is one of the things I want to go to you, Mike, soon on some of the specifics here, but I want to get your take real quickly,

Pastor Kerry, on a quote here. This is from a Christian evangelical, supposedly, author,

James K .A. Smith, and his work is featured on the Gospel Coalition website.

You can find it. And this is a tweet that he put out May 25th. He said, We've taken too long.

Habitualities built up over a 200 -year history will not be undone by tweaks on policy and half measures.

We need the collective will to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate guns. Only mammon and our idols prevent us from doing so.

Burn them down. And so he's, as a Christian, according to himself, is making the argument that actually the people who want to keep guns, such as yourself,

Pastor Kerry, have idols. What's your reaction to that line of reasoning? He is a cosmic humanist.

He is not speaking from any legitimate, objective, biblical worldview. His statement is 100 % indefensible with any logical approach to the

Scriptures. And when I say that, I would begin in Genesis and make my way all the way to the very end of the

New Testament and the Book of Revelation. There is nothing that he said in that statement that could not be trounced.

Okay. It's not biblical. It's just interesting the way he's setting it up to shame

Christians who want to hold on to the Second Amendment and their guns and ability to protect themselves as if they're engaging in idolatry.

That's a serious charge. It is a serious charge, but it comes from a mythical attempt to take a biblical worldview issue that is based in ancient principles that happens to have been rarely recognized by any government of the world in history except this one.

So, which is to say, in the founding era, because there was such extraordinary

Christian influence, I'm shooting from the hip, but I want to say 34 % of the signers of the

United States Constitution had the equivalent of an associate's degree in Christian theology, and 54 % of the signers of the

Declaration had the same. So, clearly, the

Declaration in particular was overwhelmingly influenced by Christian thinking.

The Constitution, not a majority, but still significant. 34%, 35 % of those signers.

There was an undeniable influence of biblical thinking, and so our country shining among the nations of history recognized a biblical principle that the individual household, the individual man, the head of that household, chiefly, has a tremendous responsibility that comes directly from his creator to provide proper provision for the family he creates with his wife within the confines of holy matrimony.

The case law for this begins in Exodus chapter 22, verses 2 and 3, but the principle of the purpose of civil government is introduced as early as Genesis chapter 9.

So, the first book of the Bible introduces the need for civil government, which is an expression that comes from sacredly created individuals, not the other way around.

The state didn't create us, and then secondly, the case law for the importance of self -defense is laid out in the second book of the

Bible in Exodus 22, verses 2 and 3. So, nothing that this gentleman has said is anything but statism.

It is that cognitive dissonance that says, well, our rights come from God, which I imagine you could probably get him to say that, but in the next breath, he obviously believes that the state gives permission for the individual to exist, and there's so many things that you could point out.

Like, for example, in the case law of Exodus 22, 2 and 3, it deals specifically with what am

I supposed to do when someone breaks into my house in the nighttime to potentially do bodily harm to me, my wife, my children, or to try to steal things in the process, maybe after killing us.

What am I supposed to do? Well, the Bible says that a violent defense is not an act of murder, but in fact, it is the appropriate response, and that's right there in that verse.

It's in the case law of God's law. So, if I kill someone who breaks into my house at night because they broke in and scared me and made us vulnerable, the law of God says

I am not guilty for shedding his blood. Now, isn't it interesting? It doesn't deal with what weapon

I use. It doesn't seem to care. The Bible has no emphasis at all on that. It doesn't distinguish, well, you can use a club that's 19 inches long, but you can't use a club that's 20 inches long, and it doesn't get into how long a sword can be or short or if it can have two edges or if I could use a mallet or some strange object.

The scriptures in divine case law says nothing about the weapon because it's dealing with the issue.

The assumption is it's my responsibility to defend my family, and let me just throw this out. In our culture, which is status, we almost always refer to police officers and firemen and other law enforcement type individuals as first responders, and I think that that's misleading too, and it stems from our status view.

The first responder in every act of a criminal attack really is the individual being attacked.

You can respond by covering your eyes and letting them beat you up, or you might respond by defending yourself, but the real first responder is the individual citizen that's the victim of a crime, and by nature of the laws of physics, generally speaking, the second responder, we hope, is law enforcement, but there's usually a delay, and it takes some time for them to get there.

I was just speaking with a friend of mine who's a minister, and his house, someone was breaking into his house years ago,

I think in the state of South Carolina, and he called the police, and they didn't get there for 45 minutes. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. So the first responder is the homeowner. Yeah.

Well, yeah, thank you for that, and I think that's common sense, but you're really diving into this paradigm difference.

If someone's a statist, basically, for the audience, that means that they worship government instead of God.

They put government in the place of God for many things, and so they're going to come up with different solutions, and I want to talk to you,

I guess, second responder, Mike. I want to get into some of the specifics, because I want to start here.

I was talking to my wife's grandfather yesterday evening, and he told me that, and he's in his 80s, he said that, he goes, when

I was a kid, we would bring our shotguns to school with us, because we might go hunting during hunting season on the way home, and we would just stack them in the back.

The only restriction was you got to make sure you unload them when you walk into the school house, one -room school house in the middle of the woods, and this is

New York, by the way. This isn't Alabama. This is New York, and we're only six decades removed from this.

And we have a million restrictions. Maybe you can go into some of those, and we still get these situations coming up that didn't seem to exist, at least in the same ways that they exist now, back when my wife's grandfather was a child, where there's mass shootings.

There's mass killings, and so no one wants that.

No Christian wants people to die needlessly like this. This is horrific. This is evil, right?

But the solutions that are being brought up to me seem, and I want to get your take, obviously, but they seem like they are missing the mark here.

One of the big ones being talked about right now is red flag laws, and I was hoping maybe you can shed some light on what a red flag law is, and then maybe expand on whether or not this would help in a school security situation, and maybe you could apprise us also,

Mike, on what is it like in a school security setting?

What are the potential dangers? Maybe what's being left out of the discussion that you would like to hear more of? That's a mouthful.

Yeah, it's a mouthful, and there's a lot there. First off, thanks for having me, and my heart goes out to the victims, as I'm sure you too as well pray for the family's recovery.

I'm angry at the law enforcement response. I'm angry at the school's response, and I'm angry at our political response.

I think all three of them are inexcusable, but perhaps we'll get into that.

Maybe not. We'll run out of time. Let me go to the red flag law. The red flag law basically says that a couple of people are going to determine that Mike Dolan is for some reason mentally unstable, and therefore we're going to raise the red flag.

We're going to authorize the government to go to Mike Dolan's house and take his guns in case

Mike Dolan does something terrible. Where's the problem with that? It may be well intended. Problem with that is who's making that decision?

Is my ex -wife the reporter? Is my neighbor who I just had an issue with the reporter?

Is the police chief the reporter who for some reason doesn't like me?

There could be all kinds of reasons for a person to provide false witness, so to speak.

Now, certainly there are some people who we need to raise the red flag on and say, this guy is loony.

But to give a blanket authorization for government to come in and say, red flag, take away

Mike Dolan's ability to protect himself and his house, et cetera, it's overly broad in my view.

We need to come up with a different way to determine if you need to raise the red flag on Mike Dolan.

And the red flag law doesn't appear to have any boundaries. Any two people can present the case to the judge, and the judge can just arbitrarily say,

OK, it's time to take Mike Dolan's gun. And of course, you think about the consequences of that. You come to Mike Dolan's house and take my gun, we're going to have a problem because Mike Dolan is not, don't raise the red flag on me.

I don't need the red flag. I'm perfectly fine. And we may well have a serious problem at the door.

As you come and try to take my guns and people get hurt, I get hurt.

There's no telling. And this would be at the federal or the state level, I'm assuming that there.

All right, I can tell you in Colorado, they tried to everyone's trying to pass this at the state level that I'm aware of.

They may come in with a federal level attack. But for the most part, this is at the state level.

So it's not Andy Griffith saying, you know, Otis really does get drunk too much and shouldn't have a firearm.

This is the state impersonal keeping these records.

And it sounds arbitrary to me. They could just take it away almost for any reason. Yes.

And of course, the promise says, well, we'll bring everyone to court. And if you in fact, you can demonstrate that you're capable of owning the firearm, we'll let you have it back.

But then suddenly the impetus to prove that is on the innocent person. Guilty until proven innocent.

Right. That's what I yeah, unconstitutional. They flip flop that. So we need to do something about the people who should not have guns.

There are some people who should not have guns. But not at my expense, not at the law buying citizens expense.

Right. What about school security? Could you speak to that briefly? And I don't know if you want to get in.

You can if you want the situation in Texas and what went wrong there. But I mean, you've done school security at the college level at the elementary school level.

It seems like in this situation, something went terribly wrong. And and that led to the high amount of people who died in this particular situation.

Yes. Ever since Columbine, the entire model, the paradigm has shifted completely.

Columbine, we at law enforcement were taught to set up a perimeter. Don't let the bad guys get away.

And let's call for the SWAT team and the negotiators, etc. And let them stage and develop lines of communication.

In the meantime, of course, they're blowing up classrooms and they're shooting and kids are dying.

And we didn't plan well for that law enforcement. Schools didn't plan well for that.

But to their to their defense, we'd never faced anything like that before. That was the first time.

But since Columbine, everything changed. And what we have done is we've determined that there needs to be two to prone or two levels of attacks.

One is from the school side and the other is from law enforcement response side. The school side, we we focus on hardening the target.

You've heard a lot about following everybody through that one front door. Generally, it's bulletproof.

You have the cameras and you have the intercoms and you can see good guy, bad guy. Is it mom?

Is the person visiting armed? The obvious stuff. And then you allow them access. And of course, the entire rest of perimeter of the school is hardened one way in, one way out for the general public.

That is obviously the teachers and staff. They have access via the back door.

As in this case, you saw the teacher come in the back door. It was reported that she left it propped open, honestly, at both the college and the high school and middle school grade school levels.

I've seen teachers do that all the time. And of course, we come right behind them.

We close the door and it's locked. But that wasn't the case this time. This time we had a maintenance issue.

And I've seen this often at all levels. The door is supposed to automatically close and lock behind the person, the teacher.

She says she and video, I'm told, shows that she did close and slam the door closed.

It didn't lock. That's how the bad guy got in. But there are a couple other things that the progressive schools are doing.

Every school has a fire alarm. And we're not afraid to put a fire alarm within every kid's reach. Some of the more progressive schools are putting an alarm button for automatic lockdown.

So, for instance, in this case where the teacher saw a full 15 minutes before police showed up, bad guy in a parking lot with an

AR -15 shooting. All she has to do is push the button. School automatically goes into lockdown.

Everyone's prepared. And they can go through their drills and procedures, et cetera, getting ready.

Another thing the schools are doing, the school and the police partnerships are doing, whenever there's any kind of a potential for violence within, say, a one -mile perimeter of the school, school's automatically going to lockdown.

And they do so because the dispatchers are on alert. And the dispatchers for the police say, Golden Gate High School, we've got a violent activity in your area.

Go into lockdown. And the third thing the schools are doing is they operate in perpetual lockdown.

Every time the child goes to class, the doors are locked. It's that simple. You want to go to the bathroom, the bathrooms are contained within, generally contained within the classrooms themselves.

There's no need. The only time that you have the children in the hallways is when they're going from lunch to the classroom or in the high school from classroom to classroom.

That's only between classes. So the schools are in perpetual lockdown. Lastly, some of the more progressive school and police agencies, they're sharing access to video cameras, and they're sharing access to programmable locks so that when, in this case, the police show up, they can say, unlock room number 112, that's where the bad guy is, and remotely, somebody behind a computer screen pushes a button, and we have a video access.

We don't have to hunt down the janitor who's hiding because he's afraid he or she's going to get killed.

We have access to the room. Those are some of the more progressive things that schools are doing and what really should have been done.

Many of these could have been done in this case. Gotcha.

So there are some practical things that would help in some of these situations.

Yes. Now, some of the things that are being proposed on a national level, though, are, in addition to red flag laws, are giving the government more power over mental health, too, and I don't know exactly what the specifics of that are going to look like.

I'm not sure if there are plans. I'm sure there are somewhere, but I haven't seen a plan yet that's specifically going to target mental health.

It seems similar to the red flag laws in that the state is going to have a list, and they're going to put more resources into this, but now they're stepping into this area that can affect everyone.

They can determine that your mental health, perhaps, potentially is not what it should be, and therefore, you lose certain privileges, perhaps.

I'm spitballing on that, but I want to get your take. And the other thing, of course, is just restricting assault rifles.

These are the two big things. You know, well, we just got to take care of assault rifles, and then we'll be fine. Or, well, if we put more resources into mental health and police, that will be fine.

I want to set this up by reading a tweet from Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and that's actually the seminary

I went to school at. He's a Southern Baptist. He says this, I'm a convictional conservative who has voted a straight

Republican ticket since I voted in 1976. Having made that clear, it is time to pass some common sense gun control laws that respect the

Second Amendment and protect our children. In fact, it should have already happened. Now, that's vague, but that's the kind of thing we're getting all over the

Christian world is vague. The government needs to do something. What that something is, we don't really know, but these are the options that are being presented.

So, Pastor Cary, I'd like to hear maybe from you first about these two proposals.

One, assault rifles, quote unquote, whatever that is, restricting those or making them illegal.

And then two, giving the government more control over mental health. Oh, boy.

The government can't even run a post office, so we put them in charge of our medicine, and look what they did to us.

And they always say, we're only going to do this much. And you say, no, but if I let you do that, you're going to end up doing this.

They say, oh, don't be ridiculous. And then they end up doing exactly what you said that they were going to do. Like, we're just going to have you temporarily have to wear these masks because you care about each other.

Put these masks on. And I said, if we give in to the forced masking, you're going to propose forced vaccinations.

And I was regaled. Oh, that's ridiculous. We would never do such a thing.

And then a short six months later, if you don't get this forced vaccination, you'll be fired all over the

United States. So now it wasn't good enough to let them destroy our hospitals and let them have control over my health and the fact that they couldn't run a postage system and deliver physical mail.

We let them destroy that. Now, our communication was ruined. They destroyed the hospitals and the medical system.

So now let's let them get into the psychiatric business. There's only three kinds of people that want to take away a law -abiding man's ability to own a weapon and defend himself.

OK, I want to be really simple. There's three people who are most eager to do this.

Number one, a criminal. No one would be happier about a red flag law than a really good burglar, right?

Because you could pay someone's next door neighbor, say, look, I'll give you five grand if you'll call this number and tell them that you think this guy is unstable and he should have his guns taken away.

You could pay someone off to exploit that, get someone disarmed, and then you're much more comfortable about burglarizing them a week later.

So no one's more interested about gun control and stopping good people from having firearms than number one, criminals.

Number two, tyrannical politicians. They would love to have more gun control because their whole life is about controlling everyone.

That's just what they eat, sleep, and breathe power to control.

So first, you have the criminals. They want to disarm all the good guys. Makes sense, right? Red flag laws, excellent.

Criminals will exploit those too. They already don't follow the law, right? Duh. So secondly, corrupt politicians.

Thirdly, you can be this third category and not be a criminal and not be a politician.

The third level I like to refer to as blithering idiots. Blithering idiots want to take away good people's weapons so that only bad people can use the weapons.

So and I am somewhat repeating myself because generally criminals are blithering idiots.

Generally speaking, tyrannical politicians are always blithering idiots, but it's possible to be a blithering idiot and not be a politician or a criminal.

So those are the three people that want to take away our guns. And again, the case law of the scripture doesn't seem to care what the weapon is.

It seems to care primarily why was there an altercation? Who caused it?

Who was being the bad guy and who was being the good guy? And that's what Christians should be concerned with.

These other people saying these things. And I don't care what party you're in. I mean, Republican President Donald Trump single -handedly used the executive office and the most egregious anti -Second

Amendment way we've ever seen in my lifetime. He had more courage to disarm and attack the

Second Amendment than even Bill Clinton or Barack Obama when he unilaterally outlawed bump stocks and that anyone that kept them in their possession could go to prison for 15 years.

So it doesn't matter what party you're in. Danny Akin says, I'm a Republican. I vote Republican.

Danny Akin is a statist. He believes that the government gives the permission for the individual to exist and therefore can tell every little thing about what you can or can't do.

And that's the problem in America. We were a country founded on the very rare idea that our rights didn't come from courts and judges and other people, but they only came from God.

And therefore, self -regulation, self -government was to be the largest kind of government.

Civil government does not show up when I'm being attacked in the darkness. It's my self -government that's the first responder.

And the civil government is almost always, we hope, the second responder to help me out.

Yeah, so starting points again, they're so fundamental to this whole discussion.

What about this idea? And I've heard some more conservative voices say, why don't we just arm the teachers?

What do you think about that, Mike? Is that a practical solution to this whole thing that maybe teachers should be armed as well?

Or is that just unrealistic? Why not? I mean, if you have a teacher who's qualified, who's trained, who is,

I mean, I certainly wouldn't give a firearm to somebody who didn't want to have one, but why not give the teacher the weapon?

What I would not do is let the, have open carry in the schools. I certainly wouldn't want anybody having the guns on their hip or slung around the shoulder.

But why not have them or the janitor or the, I don't have an issue with that. As long as they have the training.

There are only, used to be only two places I would never go without a gun.

And one was a school and one was a church. Because the two have been such targets for so long.

I think I would be a fool if I went to either place without a gun. Of course, since I'm a police officer,

I can take my gun into the school. And, but because you're not police officers, you have to, you will generally read the sign and say,

I'll leave my gun in the car. And now suddenly you're, you're so vulnerable. You know, when I was at Southeastern in seminary, that was one of the things that made me nervous that, you know,

I was living just off campus, but it was, it was a campus owned housing. And they told me

I could not have my guns in the vehicle, which was on a public road. I could not have them, of course, in the, anywhere on the school premises.

Even if the, they were separated from the ammunition and there was, I had to find someone else that could keep my guns.

And then when I went to Liberty university, their policies were different. They encouraged students, not just teachers, but students to get their concealed carry and bring it to school.

And the whole idea was that if there's going to be a shooting, that person's not going to get far because there's probably going to be a couple armed people in each class.

And we, you know, I remember feeling unsafe at Southeastern because I thought there are no guns here.

This is, if someone walks in, we're sitting ducks and Liberty, I felt so safe.

And some people have the opposite reaction to that. They think, oh my goodness, there's guns everywhere in here.

That's a horrible thing to have in a school or a church. Mike, you, you carry a gun,

Pastor Kerry, you carry a gun when you're preaching. I mean, I'm assuming the answer is obvious, but you want to explain that to people?

Why do you carry a gun while you're in the pulpit of all places? Mike, you want to jump in first?

If you don't mind to leverage that point, I guarantee you Danny Aikens is surrounded by a person with a gun.

So for him to sit here and say, no guns, get rid of the AR -15s. He has a staff that's armed.

And the only person, the only way we stop a bad guy with his gun is with a, by a good guy with a gun.

That's the only thing that stops them. I'm sorry, Pastor, go ahead. Yeah, good point. That's an excellent point.

Feel free to jump in anytime. Yes, I I've had, it's very simple.

The reason I carry a gun is I've had multiple death threats for many years because I'm a,

I'm a public figure and I've gone to war with statist abusers, like our tyrannical state

Supreme court and campaigned loudly against them and removed three judges.

And I, I, my, my life has been threatened many times. I've had a message left on my answering machine back in the day when we had those things.

And you know, nobody could tell me where the phone came, where the call came from.

And I figured it out who it was, but I've had people leave a message and say, I'm going to blow your blankety blank head off the next time

I see you. My father before me was threatened that he would be dead within a couple of weeks.

You know, I, I, I deal with a lot of different kinds of people. You do counseling and you have to confront people.

You do public excommunications of people who are unrepentant centers and people get bitter and angry and they want, they want to do violence.

And so, you know, there's a lot of confusion. Generally it's cliche based

Christianity. You know, someone will say, Jesus said, turn the other cheek. And it's like, well, can we put that in context?

If someone wants to slap me, that's a little different than if they want to blow my head off.

And, you know, in, in the Bible, theologically, and I know a lot of Christians have just not had any teaching at all.

And if they have had any, it's probably not good. It's not been done well, but in the scripture, we have passages where, you know,

Jesus talks about when we're for the sake of Christ, for the sake of the gospel, you know, you have this image of someone preaching on the street, they're preaching the gospel and someone wants to come up and slug them and that they allow that to happen.

And they, they take the abuse for the sake of the preaching of the gospel. And that, that is a beautiful thing.

And I just want to throw this out. I have been on the street. I have been witnessing my faith of Jesus Christ to someone on a sidewalk in Sioux City.

And I have been hit in the face in a violent attack. And I did not defend myself.

I didn't shoot them. I didn't punch them back. I just took the hit in my face and it hurt really bad.

And I looked, I looked at them when I recovered, when I could see again. And I said, you can take it out on me if you want to, but it won't change the reality that you're going to go to hell when you die, if you don't repent.

And I responded gently and lovingly. So I believe that there are occasions that are biblically based when we do not defend ourselves for the sake of the gospel.

Now, having said that, we understand this idea and we get it from Jesus Christ.

But I want to point some things out. What Jesus did was spectacularly unique in that he was allowing himself to be physically murdered on purpose for the sake of taking on the punishment of God's wrath for all of the repentant world.

And so I'm not doing that, but that's something that Jesus did. But Jesus did say that we're to take up our cross, which implies painful self -sacrifice and follow him.

So we're all on track here. Most of the preachers are saying, amen. But when you take that and you begin to become, you begin to take these kinds of noble ideas that we get from God and then pit them against what

God has said about self -defense all through his word, there's something wrong with your theology. Here's the essential thing.

Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, if there's any other way for me to do this, let this cut pass for me.

Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. And so we learn from this.

If we are to not defend ourselves for the sake of the gospel, for a higher call and a duty of sharing our faith, for example, if that's the sole reason someone wants to hit me in the face is because I just told them the truth of the gospel,

I'm not to defend myself. And that is still, that is something that's decided between me and God within the confines of my will and self -government where I consciously walk into the situation and say, not my will, but yours be done.

I am going to share my faith. And if they want to violently beat me up and even kill me,

I'll lay my life down for the cross. But I want to draw attention to something else that happened, you know, how

Peter pulled his sword out and whacked someone's ear off when they came to get Jesus. And so, first of all, you have to deal with the fact

Jesus knew that he had a sword. And earlier, if you read the text, Jesus told him to get a sword.

So you have all that dynamic going on. And here's the thing. At one point, you know, they're arguing and saying, well,

Lord, we don't want you to do this. We're not going to let you die. And Jesus says, do you not realize

I have the authority? I could call down legions of angels in my defense.

And I always think it's fascinating. People miss this. When Jesus chose to suffer without defending himself violently, he made it clear he had the legal right and the moral right.

If he wanted to, he could have defended himself violently with legions of angels.

So this is an interesting thing, because it brings you back to the not my will but yours be done issue.

So when we approach the gospel, there's not this one size fits all, you know, and I don't want to pick on them, but like the

Amish or the Mennonites who just take this vow that we'll never fight back on and you can just beat us up, we'll be the doormats of the earth.

That's not what the Bible has ever taught us. So there are times when you should not defend yourself specifically for the gospel.

But generally speaking, the Christian faith, the entirety of the scripture tells us very clearly that the head of a household has an absolute obligation to not only defend himself, but to defend his entire family.

And that's all through the Bible. And I would say it is an unusual and rare situation where a

Christian compelled by faith and the scripture would not defend themselves. I've done that.

That is something we should all understand. But I think what we're doing is the tail is wagging the dog when this issue of not defending myself for the gospel is just spread across life in general.

And when Jesus said, for example, turn the other cheek, this was not his advice to the fallen world for fighting crime.

And I think that's what happens. You have Roman Catholics that are just absolutely clutching their pearls and upset that there's a death penalty.

Well, the death penalty came from the Bible. Right, right. Yeah, good word.

And you're making helpful distinctions, which I think Christians who want to think clearly about this need to make. They need to be able to separate individual responsibility with government responsibility.

They need to be able to see what is the law say versus what's expedient or what's permissible in certain circumstances.

So let me say this, John, because I think this is a faster way to answer your question. I can choose between me and God to become a martyr for the cause of Jesus Christ.

But I can't make the choice for you to become a martyr. And so when you come to my church,

I may die for the gospel someday. Someone may get me. But the people in my flock,

I'm not going to let them be slaughtered because they didn't make a conscientious decision. I'm going to go to church and die today.

You know, I may do that. I may have death threats that I don't tell anybody about. And I make a conscientious decision.

I'm going to go ahead and preach today, even though they threaten to kill me. I'm not going to tell anybody. And if they kill me,

I'm going to go be with Jesus. I get to make that decision for me, but I'm not making it for my people that attend church on Sunday.

I'm going to make sure anybody that comes to worship Jesus in my church is absolutely safe.

And if they want to die a martyr's death, that's between them and the Lord. But it's not going to be because of my negligence that they die.

Well, and I'd imagine if someone wanted to shoot your wife, that would be a different story. Exactly right.

John Piper had written an article that the government is doing. The government is saying we will make the decision on whether you'll defend yourself.

Right. What you're saying, this is our personal decision to defend. It is. I'm in my house.

And that's my duty and responsibility. Amen. Mike, when you started as a police officer four decades ago, you didn't have issues at least to this extent with school shootings.

What do you think changed culturally? And this is going to drive us into what's the root of what's causing this?

It can't be. I mean, guns, because it's not like a new gun was developed that is so much better for school shootings or something in that time period.

What is it exactly do you think that has changed from your observations as a police officer?

And that's, you know, it's a great question. It's probably something that somebody should get a

PhD for if they answer it correctly. It takes a lot of research. But from my perspective, as you get as the light dims, it gets darker and darker.

And this is what God said is going to happen. And as we have the growing pains, as we get closer to the end times, evil is going to get greater and greater.

And that's what we're seeing. And in the days, I remember going to school with a shotgun in the rack in the back of my truck.

I was one of those kids that did that, not because I went hunting, because I thought it was cool. And I was allowed to do that.

Of course, we can't do that now. There's no way we could do that now. But as evil progresses, this is the result of evil.

And I think it's just that simple. You know, one of the things I thought when this happened, and I've had this thought many times during school shootings.

There's an irony in my mind, and maybe I'm the only one that's had this thought, probably not, that it takes place at a school.

Because what are the kids learning at most public high schools? They're learning that they're animals, that they're not being taught, obviously, the law of God, or who

God is, or any of that. They're learning that they're a product of evolution. And this has been going on, obviously, for a long time.

But I wonder whether or not we're feeling the effects of it more now, because what's the incentive?

If there is no divine rewards and punishments after death, if there's no law that's going to actually judge us, if we make our own law, and we can even determine our own gender now, apparently, based on our own whim, we're the creators of our own universe, and we're really just all animals anyway.

Why not do something evil like that? Because, you know, and you see what

I'm getting at is, maybe there's a problem with what's being taught at some of these places that's leading to this, or at least not, you know, putting up a barrier against it.

And when we first began with the school shootings, it generally was in the high schools. And, yeah, but as you look at evil, evil wants to attack the innocent.

And who's more innocent than now the grade school? Yes, right. When you go to the high school, those kids have learned, we've taught them, run, hide, fight.

And if you get caught in the room with the bad guy, you fight like your life depends on it, because it does depend on it.

And we're seeing that these high schools are fighting, and they're taking on the shooter.

We saw that in one of the schools here, a STEM school here in Colorado. He stopped the shooter by fighting.

But the kids in the grade school, they can't fight, right? You've got a teacher, an unarmed teacher, and they're the innocent, and the evil wants to prey.

The more innocent, I don't know, the more they get out of it. I'm sure there's something theological about it.

It's so twisted. These are precious little children that it's sick.

I mean, it's just there's no words when you see this devastation.

But it's in these emotionally vulnerable times that statist, as you said, Pastor Kerry, see an opportunity to prey on our emotions.

Yes, they exploit every tragedy for the purpose of enlarging the strength of the government and diminishing the liberty of the individual.

And it is demonic. Yeah. Well, I don't know if there's any closing thoughts either of you have.

Feel free, please, if you have anything that you feel like I left out that you want to say to Christians who might be listening to this.

Well, I think I would say this. When you say the word

Philistine to a biblically literate person, it conjures very negative things for a reason.

The Philistines were legendary villains in the Bible. They were wicked, evil, vile, barbaric people.

And it is interesting to me, and it is deliberately written in 1 Samuel 13, 19 through 22.

And I'll say it again, 1 Samuel 13, verses 19 through 22. And I'm not going to read the whole text.

But this quote, I think you'll find interesting. It says, not even a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of the nation of Israel, because the

Philistines had said, otherwise the Hebrews will make swords and spears. And so when you are for gun control and the oppression of a nation to prohibit good people from having access to weapons, you think just like a villainous

Philistine. And I would say we've got a lot of evangelicals spewing hogwash in the media because they want to curry favor with all kinds of poor people who don't think biblically.

And they are just modern Philistines to me. That is an interesting point.

And I had not heard that one before. And wow, yeah, I'm gonna have to look that up.

Mike, any closing thoughts from you? Mine is just so simple.

Who do you trust to protect you? The government? Look what happened in Uvalde. Do you trust the government?

Do you trust? Is that police officer really going to charge and take a bullet? I hope so.

But you don't know. And in Uvalde, Texas, we learned that they would not. Who do you trust to protect you?

I'm the shepherd of my house. And I know that I'll fight and die for my house.

And so. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Pastor Cary.

If you want to hear more from Mike and Pastor Cary, you can go get Enemies Within the Church. It's not on gun control, but it is on socialism.

How's that going? Real quick, Pastor Cary, how's the response? It's going wonderfully.

I get letters almost every day from all over the country, sometimes foreign countries, thanking us for that film and saying how much it meant to them.

Just spoke with a minister out randomly right before I came on your show, saying,

I want to get a group license and show this to my whole church. And then I just found out a couple of nights ago that we got a report back that some church somewhere had just watched it and sent a letter and said their whole congregation rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation at the end of the film because they were so thankful for it.

So I'm just humbled by it. I'm thankful for it. I think it's helping people all over the country.

And if you haven't seen it, EnemiesWithinTheChurch .com. In fact, you can see all three of us in that film.

That's true. Yeah, I'm in it a couple of times. Yeah, it may be a good thing. If you're a Southern Baptist with the convention next week, there's a lot of Southern Baptist stuff in that.

And it'll definitely be eye -opening. And I've heard some of those same things as well. That people who are kind of, you know, sitting in the bleachers, not really understanding everything, that movie was the gateway for them to start realizing what's happening in their denomination.

So, hey, God bless both of you. Thank you so much for your time. And I appreciate it so much.

Looking forward to whenever we can talk and connect next time. God bless. God bless you. Thank you.