The Christian Mindset - Part 1 — Art Katz

Bringing the Sacred Into the Secular

We need to remember that this series of talks is under the auspices of the Cass Lake school system. That is to say, it's a secularly established framework, but we're speaking a spiritual subject. And my intention is even more than to speak it, but to bring the sacred into the secular.

So for example, if we begin by praying, what in fact are we doing? We're bringing the sacred into the secular. And some might say, well, is that legitimate? And the question of whether it's legitimate, whether it's moral, whether it's ethical, whether it's legal, is already a reflection of what has preceded us in terms of the mindsets of men.

Because if there's a prevalent mindset that says that you should not mix the one with the other, and they have established laws on the basis of that concept, we tonight are restricted by the thinking of men as it has been translated into law.

So we need to understand that what is called law is really just the institutionalized thought of men that determines the practices of a community. And we know that part of the controversy of this hour, and it shall increase, is what is validly the territory of God, so to speak, that which is spiritual?

And what is the territory of society? And isn't there an understanding of the separation of state and church? And how is that established? I'm going to hand out something in a moment, the first statement of which is that the separation of church and state as a principle in American society was not established in order to protect the state.

It was established to protect the church. But what has happened through the course of time is that it has become interpreted as not just the separation of church and state, but the separation of the sacred and the secular.

When I use these two words, sacred and secular, do you have some sense of what they mean? If you don't, that understanding will grow just by the course of these nights together. And maybe I'll just stop at some time and take a stab at trying to define what these words mean.

It's really important to understand them. Secular means worldly, sacred, holy or pertaining to God. And one of my premises is that this is not a distinction that God intended. And that the purpose of God through the church is to penetrate the secular world by the sacred.

And so what we're experiencing tonight, and even raising the question of praying, is a first installment of what I expect to be increasing activity of God into the secular realm. So let's pray that this will be a historic beginning and that the grace of God will be with us.

And this is not just some kind of unctuous reference to God. It's not a ceremonial thing, but we're praying because we have a conviction that if God is not with us, we are not going to prosper. That anything that pertains to influencing the minds and heart and understanding of men, and therefore their conduct or society, requires the presence and the enablement of God.

See, that is already a premise. And to begin a class or to function without prayer, without invoking the presence of God or His blessing, already speaks for a certain kind of an attitude that has no need of God and can proceed on the basis already of its own ability.

Secular Solutions and the Need for God’s Perspective

That last statement is a secular premise, which pervades the whole of society and was even very much reflected in the three nights of telecasting on the subject of chemical dependency. How many of you saw those programs?

Okay, I'm going to speak about that in just a moment. Let's now pray. We bless your holy name and we look to you now, thanking you and praising you for the grace that will be with us, for your kingdom and for your namesake.

In Jesus' name, amen. For those that did not watch the telecast on chemical dependency, that wasn't the actual title, the chemical people, you need to know that this was a national phenomenon, a problem of such magnitude that three nights of prime time TV attention was given to the subject in a very elaborately prepared series of telecasts, followed by community discussions throughout the nation, of which there were 500 in the state of Minnesota alone.

Some of us from Ben Israel attended the local discussions at Cass Lake. And we just came, prompted by the Spirit and because we are concerned for the community, concerned for the nature of the problem, and it was an experience.

And out of that experience, which is to say really the rejection of what we represented in God, in the faintest expression even of His name or anything pertaining to Him, introduced into a secular discussion, the Lord began to open our eyes that there really is a warfare going on, that it is for the most part veiled.

But when you have the audacity or the impertinence to come in His name and to express His name and God as reality into a secular context and discussion, it's remarkable the kind of resistance and force that rises up against it.

And so we were inspired just to meditate on that and to write a statement, which I want to hand out to you tonight, and maybe we'll read it together and you can take it home. It may be part of our text.

There's a place on some of the sheets for comments and notes that you can take tonight as we discuss or as you yourself are reading it. And maybe it's as good as any introduction into the subject that I can think of because it's vital, it's fresh, it's recent.

Everybody's now got a copy of this? Okay. I'm going to read aloud and maybe make some comments as we're going. It was entitled, A Plea to Our Community. Actually, it's the second statement that we made.

If you'd like to first, I can make that available also. And we came with the first statement to the first night's meeting, sensing that we might not have too great an opportunity to express the burden of God as it pertains to this epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction and that we want to therefore have some statement to show a position, a biblical and godly position toward the problem.

What we found out by the last night was that though we did not distribute it wholesale and made it available selectively to those who expressed interest, it was a point of offense for many who were there that somehow even to circulate or to make available a printed statement that made reference to God into a secular discussion.

So that was part of the response that prompted this second statement, which I think is sharper than the first. And it is a plea to our community. It's interesting to note that the principle of separation of church and state, ironically intended for the protection of the church and not the state, has come also in our time to mean the separation of the secular from the sacred.

This is a tragic and false deduction, especially in an hour when the secular world is desperately in need of the knowledge, perspective, and counsel that can only come to it from outside itself. That true church, which is radically biblically oriented, as against the nominal, man-affirming religious institutions, that confirms society in its present conventional wisdom.

The True Church and the Revelation of Truth

So just to pause there for a moment. It's already dynamite. Because what we're saying is that there's a true church and a false. As a matter of fact, maybe I shouldn't be this pointed or particular, but I'm sure that in about every one of these community discussions there was a representative of the clergy on the panel, as there was with the one that we attended.

And I think in more times than not, the representation was not of the true church, as I'm describing it here, but of that institutional church that affirms or confirms the wisdom of men. In fact, we were shocked by some of the statements made by that clergyman.

It was, to us, a real disservice to the gospel. He would have been better off silent than to wear the clerical identification of the turned-around collar and an enormous cross dangling from his neck, and then to contradict everything of that cross that speaks in every word that he uttered.

So what we're saying now to these people, that they need to know that what they call the church needs to be analyzed or understood as not necessarily representing God or God's view, and that there's a perspective that needs to come to the world which, of necessity, must come from outside itself.

For example, have you ever contemplated that truth, righteousness, true morality are things that can only be known to believers because they come down from heaven? Truth is not just or merely scientific accuracy.

That's the most minimal of definitions. Jesus said that he would send the spirit which even the world could not receive, the spirit of truth. So truth is more than just factual correspondence or accuracy.

It's the spirit of truth. One of my fond definitions is that truth is everything as God himself sees it. See why you need to take notes? And maybe I can just extend that tonight to say that the only way that we can have it is through the revelation of what God sees given to us by his spirit.

Do you realize the enormous statements that I'm making? I'm giving you sacred premises that ought to be the foundation of our life if we profess to believe. But the fact of the matter is that it's not, and that's why the world is in the condition that it is, one of which symptoms is the epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction.

Truth can only be known by the church, and therefore it is the agency intended by God by which it is to be brought into the world and to men. If the church does not bring the understanding of truth, it is not to be had.

You can have it scientifically. You could have it physically in terms of things that are measurable. But the kind of truth that I'm talking about, the truth that affects the way in which men live, morally and ethically, that must come down to us from God.

And what does he tell us in his word? My way is not your way, nor are my thoughts your thoughts. As great as is the distance from heaven and earth, so great is the difference between my thoughts and your thoughts and my ways and your ways.

God doesn't want to restrict the knowledge of his way only to a small presence on the earth called the church. But the church is the agency or the instrument by which truth is to be made known and to permeate the society in which it is placed.

So to confine our activity and our knowledge only to services is to defeat the very purpose for which God has established us. To allow the world to go on with the understanding that the sacred and the secular are separate distinctions and legitimate is to honor them in a lie that God did not intend.

And the fact of the matter is that we have been patsy for too long, and the church has submitted itself to the premises and the understanding and the definitions of the world which is completely the reverse of what God intended.

It's the world that should be submitting itself to the definitions of the church. For the church alone has the truth by the spirit. True church, that is. The recent community discussions on the epidemic of chemical dependency is a case in point.

Naming Sin Rather Than Excusing It

You say, Art, why did you put the phrase chemical dependency in quotation marks? I wanted to indicate that I do not agree with the term. That the term itself is a lie. It's a euphemism. You say, what's that?

A euphemism is the world's ability to disguise the nature of something by giving it a nice sounding ring. Mortuary. Mortician. Maybe you can help me with some words like that that disguise the ugliness or the terror or the stark nature of death or other things.

In the old days, we used to talk about junkies and somehow there was a stab with a word like that, a junkie or a drunk. It brings a vivid thing home. You see shattered families. You see pain. You sense anguish of soul and devastation of what is made in God's image.

But to speak about a chemically dependent person or an abuser has a much milder and therefore deceptive connotation. You see the kind of analysis that I'm bringing is the kind that the church should be continually expressing in the world.

We have been silent far too long. We have accepted the unspoken premises by which the world conducts itself and we use its terms and therefore by doing so we subscribe to their meanings. And therefore the whole moral content that should be stabbing the hearts of men unto repentance is removed.

See it makes a difference whether you see a problem as a dependency or as sin. One requires repentance and the other requires institutional care. The way you define a problem is the way that you respond toward its solution.

And the reason that the problem has reached epidemic proportions is because they had no solution because they have not adequately defined it in the truth as God himself sees it because the church has been silent and does not see and move by the spirit and has restricted itself to only its Sunday religious activity punctuated by midweek Bible studies and things of that kind.

The greatest fallacy under which the church itself is suffering and I'm going to repeat this many times in the course of these days is that we have allowed the world to define the church and therefore by that definition to restrict its activity.

God never intended church as a mere Sunday phenomenon but as a salt in the earth and a light unto the world. And if that light does not come to illumine what is the nature of our devastating social problems what then shall be the answer?

So this is a tragic and a false deduction. Why is it tragic? Because it removes the one saving ingredient that could alter the conditions that are. Even that the secular world is desperately in need is only a statement that could be made by a believer because the world is incapable of perceiving its own condition.

Only a believer has a biblical context out of which he sees the world. For example the scripture says that in the last days or the last times perilous times shall come. Men shall be lovers of self and lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.

Disobedient, unruly, unholy, unthankful and it goes on like that. So we who know these scriptures and believe them as the truth of God spoken in anticipation of the hour in which we now live see the world about us through the word that is given.

So therefore what others would dismiss as harmless or just a passing phenomenon or that's the way kids are. They've got to grow up. It's only adolescent culture. We are not impressed by this kind of dismissal because we see it in the context of the word.

We bring something to our view of reality that is very much profoundly affected by the word that is given by God. See who else has this but those who believe? And the question again is is that to be confined or restricted only to those who believe or does God intend that that concept, that seeing be shared with those who do not have the advantage of those who do?

Cultural Decline and the Church’s Responsibility

Just as a little anecdote I hope there won't be too many I've just come back from an overseas trip and not the least of which was attending the Billy Graham Conference in Amsterdam on world evangelism for about nine days.

And on a Sunday toward the end of those days they sent out 4 ,000 evangelists from all over the world into Amsterdam and various other towns and cities beaches and places of recreation. I was on bus number one to the Jew first.

And we went to the beach. It's strange that the films that I took were completely destroyed. Maybe God didn't think it tasteful to show them but I shot a whole roll of film of that day on the beach where I would say that if I could give a percentage maybe almost a half of all women were bare-breasted.

Can you imagine the culture shock for a man like myself to see a mother, a middle-aged mother and say a daughter in the twenties walking side by side down the beach bare-breasted with complete equanimity and poise.

Not an iota, a scintilla of embarrassment or social discomfort. Why? Because it has become normative in the society in which they live. It was to be seen everywhere that day. And so they had an outreach on the boardwalk sponsored by Billy Graham Crusades and a big musical group and few testimonies about how great it is to be saved and how good God is which was good but there was something in my spirit burning that there needed to be a word spoken something out of the word.

So I went to the platform and I said can I just say something just for a few minutes and they gave me the microphone and what do you think my text was? It was Sunday in Amsterdam a great reformation country a place where believers have in times past historically sought refuge from religious persecution in the world.

And it does not take long for an enormous deterioration to set in to where this is one of the mildest phenomena that we saw in those days. The punk rock culture which was formerly limited to the periphery of society the most extreme cases is now permeating the mainstream of middle class Dutch culture.

So when you pass barber shops or beauty shops you see pictures of the punk rock haircut and on the trolleys and buses and in the streets respectable so-called middle class young people wearing punk rock style clothing and punk rock haircut where the hair is dyed scarlet electric shocking colors and it is now becoming the normative pattern of middle class life.

See there is something permeating the lump till it becomes normative no longer questioned no longer a shock and by such a means society is brought to its Sodom and Gomorrah stage and extinction. I've been in Holland many times and I went this time as in past times to the Red Light District which exceeds any in the world to my knowledge.

It runs for miles around certain canals interestingly in the very area that was occupied by orthodox Jews before World War II. And the vacuum that was created by their cremation has come now the pornographers the peep shows the prostitution perversion of every variety and form where you can see live demonstrations on platforms of every kind of incestuous, filthy, animalistic orgy.

And what shocked me this time was that as in past times I could always distinguish between the natives of this bizarre quarter and those who came to gawk. This time I was unable to make the distinction.

Something has so already worked in Dutch and European culture that the line of distinction between the bizarre and the straight is dissolving. And it's hard to say who is the queer who is the freak or who is the prostitute and who is the one who has come to gawk or to purchase.

You can imagine that God's conversation with Abraham that he would scare a city if he could so much as find ten righteous men is not just a story out of the Bible. By the way, that word story is usually spoken by people who are unbelievers or whose belief is minimal.

It's not a story. It's an actual event. And that we're coming again to a time except that the church become the church and begin to roll back this enormous secular rising process that is taking place in the earth called culture, called rock, called music, called dress, called fun, called escape, called a high.

The world is going to be inundated and there will be no alternative but for the judgment of God again to come upon it. In fact, I would not think it extreme to say that the charge of responsibility for the present condition of the world is not to be laid at the world's door but at the church's door.

The priest shall teach the people the difference between the holy and the profane. And if the church is not priestly neither is it the church. If it is not performing a teaching function in the world let alone at Sunday school classes which are often drab enough it is failing in its priestly task.

It's interesting that if you look up the word secular tonight or tomorrow you know what you're going to find? A synonym for the word secular is profane. The absence of the sacred. By using such deceptive phrases as chemical dependency.

And we're going to say more about that in this article. Space forbids reiterating the frightening magnitude of the problem sufficient as it is to initiate free success of nights of prime TV attention followed by community meetings throughout the nation including 500 in the state of Minnesota.

What became apparent both in the programs and the discussion that followed is that our society is being faced with a new order of problem that is irrational. What do you mean by that? I mean by that that the rational mind cannot understand it.

It is not susceptible to analysis by intelligence. That's what it's meant. And just to make a further statement the entire world is becoming irrational. Freaking out. There's so much I want to say to you.

When you begin to see irrationality having its sway in the world the world itself becoming increasingly irrational without reason, without mind or reason you can readily see from that the activity of Satan.

You say, how do you connect this? Because Satan's purpose in earth is to profane everything that is made by God. He wants to maw and to destroy that which is made in God's image. And if God intended mankind to be an intelligent being and rational then the activity of Satan in our generation is to work against that kind of rationality and reason and to move men toward impulse and to bizarre conduct that is its opposite.

Society is being faced with a new order of problem that is irrational, destructive and peculiarly unsusceptible for sociological or psychiatric explanation. For those of us whose view of spirit reality is biblical and experiential the all too familiar evidences of Satanic power working through alcohol and drugs was evident.

The effect on human personality from disorientation to mindlessness, to suicidal impulse this is a progression. It begins with the disorientation of personality. They get dull in their minds, hazy in a strange state and from that beginning it goes to a mindlessness.

They don't know where they are or what they're doing. There are complete losses and gaps and lapses that they just don't know what they did from between Friday night to Monday morning. So suicidal impulse bore the mark of the evil one who was called by Jesus a murderer from the beginning.

It's interesting that on the one occasion in the three nights where we had some opportunity to stand and to speak something from the perspective of God that was my statement. I wanted to show them that there's a Satanic character in the nature of the problem that is being described that they must recognize because where there's death and it was admitted from the platform that there's a death every week in Cass Lake from alcohol, from drugs, through auto accident, through suicide one form or another that the grim reaper is taking an enormous harvest over the modern world because he's a destroyer and you can add to that Beirut, Lebanon you can add to that Granada, you can add to that every place where there's violence, killing, murder Central America, bloodshed everything predicated on violence.

You know that Satan is there because he's a murderer from the beginning. It's remarkable that even to make a reference like that into secular discussion could not have been worse than if someone had dropped his pants and defecated in the middle of the room.

Excuse me for the analogy but if he had been there he would have not thought it extreme. The shock, the horror, the recoil the look of offense on faces needs to be described. You would think that some horrible thing had been spoken that is so tasteless that was in such bad taste that how could you have had the audacity to sound it?

You know what that's a statement of? That the world is so unaccustomed to the mention of God in its secular discussions that they are affronted and offended when it comes. That should never have been.

They should be far more accustomed to hearing a divine perspective in every secular discussion. You say, Robert, isn't the Lord just concerned with the church? No. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof and the nations and those that dwell in them.

Psalm 24 We have a right, we have a mandate those of us who believe to bring the divine perspective of God at every secular level to challenge its unspoken, unquestioned premises and assumptions by which it operates.

Spiritual Warfare and Principalities

One revelation that came to me in this regard in the field of medicine because every one of these areas is ruled over by principalities and powers. If you don't know what that means let's wait for the next series of lectures.

I'll tell you, if God has ever stood a subject to me it's that subject which was the last lecture at Walker in the recent seminar. Principalities and powers. If we are living and operating in ignorance of that phenomenon we are valueless in terms of the kingdom and likely to be victims ourselves as much as society by their tremendous influence in the earth especially through institutions.

Education training the media medicine culture are principal areas of activity for principalities and powers to influence entire society away from God including the church to profane it and to disfigure it from the image that God intended.

So my one reference for example the way the illumination came as often it will through experience and that's why I say that our view of spirit reality is not only biblical but it is experiential. How many of you in this room believe that there is actually a devil?

That there are demon spirits that he has a host of of workers called demon spirits and that they are operative in the earth? The only reason you can raise your hand to that is not only because you believe it because it says so in the scripture but because since you became an active believer you have experienced the resistance and the opposition of that spirit entity.

I never was bothered by demons I never knew there was a Satan for 35 years so long as I was lost and in his kingdom. He had no necessity to reveal himself. I was already well in his hand and operating perfectly according to his premises.

But from the day that I crossed over from death unto life I was made aware that there is an enemy. Very real. And because we have that awareness we need all the more to press that upon the consciousness of those who are living without any such awareness and therefore they have no alternative but to predicate their solutions on a completely secular basis.

The Failure of Community Task Forces

And so what was the solution according to the three days of discussion? Community wide task forces. I mean it's quaint it's sad, it's melancholy you don't know whether to laugh or to cry it's like the proverbial kid with his finger in a dike trying to hold back a flood.

That somehow through some humanistic task force by well intending citizens they're going to come together and intelligently discuss the problem and devise remedies and enact it. When already the night before they confessed and it's written here that every person who is an addict or an alcoholic who has been submitted for treatment in the Cast Lake Rehabilitation Program is today back on either drugs or alcohol.

A zero success rate. What then can be hoped for in any kind of a task force that seeks a solution outside of God and the understanding that comes from Him and the power that is provided by Him. This kind cometh not out but by fasting and prayer is a statement that will completely befog the minds of unsuspecting secular authorities.

And the reason is that they're not church oriented and maybe even if they are some kind of harmless innocuous Sunday activity where they get an uplift and the ugly subject of demonism or Satan and the conflict between kingdoms is never once mentioned because the pastor and the entire system wants the people to leave feeling good.

So while the world is dying gagging on its vomit, its puke we're feeling good. So what I'm describing in that fourth paragraph are the evidences that Satan is at work in what is called chemical dependency.

Disorientation, mindlessness, suicidal impulse. Bear the mark of the evil one who is called by Jesus as a murderer from the beginning. Indeed the fatalities of suicide, death by auto accidents and death while yet living are to us persuasive evidences that we are contemplating a phenomenon that cannot be understood secularly and therefore neither be solved on that basis.

Whenever you see death you know that Satan is at work. The last enemy to be conquered. He's a destroyer. The unmistakably characteristic work of Satan has also to be seen through the lie. He was a liar also from the beginning.

He's the father of lies. You can quit when you want. How many have begun the step-by-step path to disintegration by just experimenting on the phrase given by a friend who wants to induce them. You can quit when you want.

How many of them even while they were increasingly into the habit kept deluding and deceiving themselves by still believing that they could quit when they want. And the realization that they could not quit came when they sought earnestly to stop and realized by then it was too late that they could not quit and that it was a lie.

Are you sufficiently sacredly minded that you know that when you see a lie and when you see evidences of death that Satan is working? That is to have the mindset of God required of his people. Okay. You can quit when you want.

You need this to cope with the tensions of life. We ought to be raising the question why does life have its tensions? When God says, My grace is sufficient for you. And we're either going to come awake as the church and say that that is God's statement for mankind.

That life is not a picnic. It's a trial. It's a place of preparation for eternity. Of necessity there's going to be abrasive and challenging things that are intended by God to break the power of the world, the flesh and the devil and to fit us for an eternal relationship with God in ruling and reigning in the earth.

That the basis of life is not the pursuit of pleasure. See, that's the secular premise. The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is the unspoken premise by which the whole of modern civilization is predicated.

But it is not a biblical view. What is the biblical view? The inevitability of suffering and the centrality of the cross. So can you see that not only are these different views, they are diametrically opposed and in vital collision.

And this collision is going to result in sparks. There's going to be a fierce collision and we need to be in anticipation and preparation for it for the issues are becoming increasingly sharp. And there's a remarkable anti-Christ spirit in the world that resists even the faintest mention of his name or the introduction of God into what they think is a secular discussion.

So you need this to cope with the tensions of life or to be socially acceptable by others. If I wrote all that could be written here, we would have a book. But every one of these statements is so remarkable.

The very lies that Satan uses are at the heart of all of human life. Why are men and women concerned to be socially acceptable? The one phrase that came up repeatedly in the community discussion that we attended was peer pressure.

Kids are going to drugs and drinking because of peer pressure. They don't want to be outside the crowd. They want to be one of the boys. They want to be accepted. They need the esteem of their peers. Well, that's a foundational psychological principle.

We need a sense of acceptance. But what we need is the acceptance of God, not the acceptance of men. It's for the want of that deep sense of acceptance by God, the knowledge that we are accepted in the beloved, that we are so susceptible and so easy to be manipulated for the necessity of being one of the boys or being socially acceptable.

What we should be is divinely acceptable. And we know there's only one basis for that divine acceptance. It's not by our virtue, nor by our works, but by his blood. But try mentioning the subject of the blood of Jesus Christ in a secular audience as a basis for the acceptance that would save men from the necessity for alcohol or drug dependency and see what you get.

God has truly chosen the foolish things to confound the wise. This is offensive to the secular mind. And you know what I suspect? It's offensive even to our mind. We might whisper it meekly in church where we think we're among kindred spirits, and even then we're not too comfortable with the concept.

But to come into the marketplace and speak all the words of this life, that really staggers us. We are offended ourselves and ashamed ourselves of the gospel. And we cannot say with Paul, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.

Paul did not limit his activity to synagogues. He went into the marketplace and he made known the way of God to men. Some scoffed, some doubted, some said we'll hear again of this later. They never did.

But some claimed unto him and believed. And that's where we need to be, in the marketplace, speaking all the words of this life. But I'll tell you what, if we do not ourselves believe those words, we might just as well save our breath.

If it's only for us a kind of catechism or biblical presets or doctrine that is lifeless and we do not know the power of the gospel and the power of the blood, our words will not be convincing or penetrating.

It's to stand and to speak. So you can see how much is resting on ourselves coming into the mindset of God, not just conceptually, but also experientially. That we can stand and speak. I never did give that illustration about the medical profession.

A Spiritual Mindset in Medicine

Well, about eight years ago, just when we came up to Minnesota for the first time, I had broken my leg in Minnesota, my kneecap. And I believe that a believer does not have accidents. How many of you believe that?

See, that's a sacred premise. What does the world say? Well, I had an accident. Well, we couldn't help it. See, they dismiss the very things by which they should be seeing. The hand of God in their lives.

Moving them to the acknowledgement of God and to salvation. You know why they dismiss things as accident? Because the church itself deeply and inwardly believes that it's accident. Or just a change of season or an upset in the cycle or the economic order or something like that.

The fact of the matter is that we tend to interpret nature and society in exactly the same way as the world itself does. Which is to say, naturally rather than spiritually. We do not see the hand of God operative in nations and in the conduct of men through judgment, through social upheaval, and through upheaval in nature.

We call it an accident. We call it an earthquake. We do not see it as God seeking to shake men to an awareness that he's the God of all this earth and that what they're suffering is a calamity designed to bring them to an awareness of himself lest they eternally perish.

You say, brother, you sound like you're from the Middle Ages. You have a medieval view. Well, I want to tell you that I believe that the view that I'm stating is God's timeless view. It's the sacred mind.