Extreme Pacifism | Ep 16

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But this is actually judgment on Barak and on Israel because they have now female leaders and fighters because their men are not stepping up as men.

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So it says in 1st Corinthians 16, quit ye like men, be strong. Act like men, be strong.

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Part of masculinity is to be the ones to go be on the front line, battle in the war. And so it's kind of really a judgment on the lack of male masculinity in a culture that you have an army with with female fighters.

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And welcome to Tearing Down High Places.

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My name is Joe Gormley. I'm here, I'm Average Joe, here with Pastor Jeff, Jeff Klewer, and Pastor Tim Robinson.

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And we're excited to be here again and we're grateful that you would listen and share this with other people.

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This podcast we call Tearing Down High Places. So what kind of high place are we gonna tear down this week?

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Extreme pacifism. Extreme pacifism. What's wrong with extreme pacifism? Faith.

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Isn't that like our verse? Those who know our God stand firm and take action. Ah. So if we're doing that, then we can't be

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Well, on the micro level, if you see a little child getting abducted from a

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Wawa parking lot and you just stand by and do nothing, you're not standing firm and taking action.

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You're a coward, right? Obviously. Everybody would agree with that. So is there not a national application of that principle?

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That's fantastic. But it's hard, I mean, because we want, we know Jesus promoted peace, right?

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Yeah. We want to live peaceably with all people. So far as it has to do with ourselves, right?

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And that's the one, that's the caveat, right? Right. But if it's, if it's pushed on us, we've got accountability.

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Right. Right. Right. Definitely. And there are pacifists, like John Piper famously talked about, if somebody broke into his house, he would sooner allow his own family to be killed than to kill the person who's intruding.

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And I think that's such an extreme version of pacifism that it's, it becomes sinful.

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Who said that was good? That was Piper. Yeah. Well, Piper took a lot of flack from that, like he just did for me right there.

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Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me give a verse. Why don't we open the scripture? So Luke 22, 36, he said to them, but now let the one who has a money bag take it, and likewise a knapsack.

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And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.

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Jesus commanded to take up the sword for a certain purpose, and obviously that's for self -defense.

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They're supposed to have a sword with them to defend their women and their children, and maybe even themselves in some circumstances.

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Yeah. So don't let their friends and family die when an intruder comes in.

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Right. No. Yeah. That would probably be... Yep. You should defend your home. Like John Piper, but he got that one wrong.

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Yeah. And there would really be no ethical difference between your house getting broken into in the Old Testament and your house getting broken into in the

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New Testament. The law in the Old Testament, and theonomists are pointing this out, that there's still a moral authority to what it's saying there.

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If it's the middle of the night and it's dark, and you hear a crash downstairs, you come in to kill.

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Because you don't know if they're attacking, if they have a gun, if they have a sword, it's dark. But if it's daylight and you hear something, you come downstairs and you can see them running out the door.

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You don't shoot them in the back. Right. Because it's clear they're there to be a thief from you, not there to kill you.

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So there's specific law about that, and really what that's proving is self -defense.

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You're there to... You need to defend your family, even if it means you kill the other person. You don't want to kill them, but you can.

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And yeah, you need to defend your family. That's a great example in New Jersey, because that law has been taken out of context in New Jersey because we're run by pagans.

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And they're not thinking from the right perspective, but they're twisting an existing law.

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I don't know if you guys know this or not, in New Jersey, if you're defending your home, and you're not completely cornered, if there's a person coming at you with a gun, and you shoot them and kill them in your home, if there was a door behind you and you could have ran out the door, you can be charged with murder.

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Wow. Yeah. It's a different ethical grid. Right. So it's not about the defense. It's, did you have an escape route?

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So they put the criminal... Yeah. Yeah. You know what

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I'm saying. Yeah. They put the burden of proof on you. Yeah. As if you invited that guy to come.

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Your intent to not kill him versus a guy in your house with a gun. Yeah. Right.

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The guy didn't invite the guy in to come in and maybe kill him, maybe not. Right. Why would the burden be on the guy who didn't invite an intruder in his home that may or may not be killing him?

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It is not his obligation to find the exit and not worry about people that could be in his home.

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How about his family? No offense, a grown man who loves his family, isn't going to try to find an exit instead of killing the guy coming into his home.

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Right. And Jesus never promotes extreme passivism, but we have something that's called just war theory that comes to us through a lot of scholarship over thousands of years since Jesus gave us the

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New Testament. Right. What, who's the most influential there from your opinion?

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God. I think we got to start with, we got to start with the scripture. Why don't we start with like Romans 13 and...

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Okay. All right. First Peter 2 .14. Yeah. So, so when, when, when is a just war?

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I mean, what's, what's the criteria there? Well, let's look at Romans 13 to begin with, and then maybe we can begin to list a few things.

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Okay. Romans 13, let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God.

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And those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities, resists what

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God has appointed, those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

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Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority, then do what is good and you will receive his approval. For he is

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God's servant. That word is deacon, diakonos, God's servant, God's servant for your good.

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But if you do wrong, be afraid for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out

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God's wrath on the wrongdoer. So the idea here is that government is designed by God to be a deacon of God that restrains wickedness in the land.

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And it's primarily in view here is kind of within the nation. But the question arises is what if you have an entire nation that's gone rogue?

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So Adolf Hitler's Germany, the Nazi party overtaking, and now they're aggressing, crossing borders into France and all around.

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There's a right to self -defense because this government, your government needs to resist that government.

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So you have the sword for a reason. Well, I'm glad you picked a verse that's uncontroversial amongst

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Christians even. Yeah, yeah. So it's just so clear. Yeah. I mean, the obvious question is, we know many

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Christians would say, but Jeff, this says we must obey the government no matter what they do, no matter what they say.

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And it says it's God's deacon who rewards those who are not rewards, but praises those who do right and punishes those who transgress.

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So if we as a church are doing right, we're worshiping the king of kings, the Lord Jesus, and we're singing psalms and hymns to one another.

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And we're taking communion in the presence of one another. And the government comes in and says, you can't do that.

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They're now not rewarding or praising what is good. They're punishing what is good. They've inverted themselves from a deacon of God to an opposer of God.

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So now the right and the godly thing to do is to resist that.

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And the question is, at what point does that ever become a just war? But even at the beginning, you need to resist tyranny.

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So tyranny is different than just government. So the right thing to do would be Acts 5 .29.

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There's clearly a place where Romans 13 .1 is not just absolute that you just obey because they say in Acts 5 .29,

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is it right for us to obey you or God? So there is a time for disobeying government.

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So let me just ask a clarifying question there. Are you saying that not all governments are

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God's servant or deacon? So they are in principle, but in actual practice, you can have a corrupt ruler called a tyrant.

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John Calvin wrote about that in his institutes. The last two aphorisms, he had a hundred short sayings to summarize the institutes of the

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Christian religion. So in the hundred aphorisms, the last two are about the arriving of a tyrant who has that office in the

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Romans 13 office. However, he's begun to exert himself as a tyrant rather than as his role as a deacon of God.

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Let me just read these to you real quick. John Calvin's institutes, look at what we have here.

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Imagine that just being so handy. You got it right there. Right in arm's reach.

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Yes. That's where it lives right there next to Erickson and Grudem. Two of my favorite systematic theologians.

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So you don't like Erickson? Don't know. He's like the average. He's like the go -to guy for Baptists. Especially Southern Baptists.

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He's not fully reformed, but yeah, he's good. I really like his systematic. Millard Erickson.

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But this is John Calvin. The last two sentences he wrote, in two ways,

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God restrains the fury of tyrants, either by raising up from among their own subjects, open avengers who rid the people of their tyranny or by employing for that purpose, the rage of men whose thoughts and contrivances are totally different, thus overturning one tyranny by means of another.

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This is Isaiah chapter 10. You have the wickedness of, of course, you have the wickedness of Israel and their kings have become tyrannical and unjust.

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God will raise up a worse tyrant, even the Assyrian king to come and judge

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Israel. I was going to ask you where, what about scriptures? We don't want to elevate. We don't want to be even accused of elevating

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Calvin to scripture. Yeah. Well, what he's doing is he's expositing scripture to come to these aphorisms.

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That's all the institutes we're, we're a systematic of what the scripture teaches. Doesn't mean he's always right, but he,

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I think he does a great job of that. Um, so in, in Isaiah 10, you have God using as an instrument, a wicked nation to judge a wicked nation.

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That's the idea here. And then Habakkuk complains about this. Why would you send Assyria, the most wicked nation on earth to judge wicked

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Israel? God says, well, I'm going to judge wicked Assyria with another nation after.

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So now Babylon will be the Avenger against Assyria. You see how that works? Dominance of wickedness.

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Yes. So what do you do? What do you do if you you're living under a tyrant and there's no other tyrant to take care of that?

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Well, here he has to wait for that. He has the peasants waiting here, but here's the last aphorism number 100.

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Okay. The obedience enjoined on subjects does not prevent the interference of any popular magistrates whose office it is to restrain tyrants and to protect the

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Liberty of the people. Our obedience to magistrates ought to be such that the obedience, which we owe to the

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King of Kings shall remain entire and unimpaired. So that last sentence is the King of Kings is above all.

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That's Christ. But there's something this, what are called the lesser magistrates. Matt Truhala is,

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I think it's like from Michigan. He's a pastor. Great guy. Wrote a book called the doctrine of the lesser magistrates.

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He traces this sentence in Calvin to John Knox to Witherspoon and the black robe regiment in the

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American revolution. Okay. And the idea is lesser magistrates. You have King George on his throne. God will raise up lesser magistrates, a governor in Virginia, a governor in Princeton, New Jersey.

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He was a representative for our state, John Witherspoon. So it says the obedience enjoined on subjects does not prevent the interference of any popular magistrates.

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So you appeal to the lesser magistrates to interpose on behalf of the people and they have a role that God will use them and you can support that.

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So to restrain the tyrants and to protect the Liberty of the people. Wow. That's great.

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I like it. I love it. Cause you tie it all back to scripture and it gives it, it really, really opens up Romans 13.

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And where, where is Calvin pointing back to scripture in 100? You did 99.

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Yeah. Where does the doctrine of, I would have to, because I haven't read the book recently, I would point to a book.

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It's called the doctrine of the lesser magistrates by Matt Truhala and check his, his

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Bible exposition to support that. Yeah. Now that it begs the question though, what, so like, you know, we've got a list of criteria for just war.

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There's a whole just war theory. Yes. Yeah. Let's go for that. That points back to Calvin back up on the shelf.

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The question that I'm thinking about because of what Calvin said is what, what is our standard?

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Our standard is God's word, right? And when we talk about sin, what's the standard?

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Romans 3 .10. Nobody's good. Not even one. Everyone has sinned. And we always say that because the standard is perfection.

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So I think where we, where, where I've seen pushback is, you know, well, that government's not that evil.

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They're just kind of evil. Yeah. Just a little evil. My question to you is, is it the Christian's responsibility to address every evil, every sin?

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This, that principle could just devolve into anarchy because every ruler is going to be a sinful human.

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There will be aspects of it. So many just war theoreticians or whatever, will talk about how you exhaust every possible option short of war.

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Okay. First. So it begins by appealing, you know, maybe preaching in a pulpit, maybe writing letters to the person, organizing demonstrations, as many things as you can do short of war.

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War is, in other words, war is a last resort. Right. Because you recognize it will involve the taking of life. Right.

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Yeah. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be a great example of that. How much did he speak and preach before he actually attempted to assassinate

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Adolf Hitler? I would argue that the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler was perfectly godly.

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There was nothing sinful in that. Right. Because he's resting, it's war. At that point, he knows it's open warfare.

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He is a German citizen, but he's on the side of the resistance. Yeah. And he's fighting for these Jewish people who are being brought to the slaughter.

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And Proverbs says, rescue those who are being brought to, being carried away to slaughter. That makes me think, like, this is just a quick side note.

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Yeah. With all the abortion that's going on and the abortion clinics, if someone were to bomb that place,

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I do not know if that would be like the worst thing in the world, because people are getting slaughtered there.

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That has been going on for the past like months. I'm sorry, but I don't want to sidetrack, but it's just...

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It's fair to talk about that. Yeah. It's fair to bring that up and consider the morality of that. I'm not going to go bomb an abortion place, so that's not going to be me.

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I don't see that as the resort right now. But where is the line? Where is it? Because it's hard to tell, because if someone did that,

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I'm not going to say that was wrong. It might not be wrong if you're saving lives. It's tough.

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I'm not going to go do it. I'm just thinking, because people are being slaughtered, and there's not enough...

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I mean, we go protest, and I feel like that's a good thing. That's good. Yeah. I think it's...

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And that's really like... Do you think it's the amount of time that the sinfulness is being identified?

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And Christians probably need to be out early, calling it out early, and then saying...

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Yes. I think that's a big problem. I think that's the issue. We haven't exhausted every option. When we were out there for love life, where we have, what, 20 people?

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Yeah. We haven't rallied enough and done everything possible to try to save the lives of these babies.

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And we might have been too passive up until this point. Yeah. There's still a long way to go before there should ever be a civil war in America.

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Now, there's another principle here that we haven't gotten to, and Calvin talks about that in the aphorisms. It's not the part of an individual to become a vigilante.

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No. We're not talking about vigilante. So that person, I think, would be a vigilante. So the abortion clinic bomber, why he shouldn't do it?

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He'd be a vigilante. But what has to happen is legitimate government declaring war.

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So whether it's a lesser magistrate... So the governor, separating from George, he's a legitimate governor, and there's a declaration of war on behalf of the people.

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So that's different than just some guy, which is what Calvin's party is. Taking matters into his own hands.

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You don't want vigilantism. You want recognized authority. So what God will do is he'll either raise up another nation, or there can be,

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I think, at some point, a revolutionary war. But that's a declared war. See, we're getting into this now. The American Revolution, I think, was a just war because it was done this way.

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It was not vigilantism or just a few people shooting a soldier in the street or something. No, this was the leaders who are the lesser magistrates.

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And it was official. It was a whole national movement. Two legal entities combating, and they were very specific in that, okay, so now we have legal colonies, and one of the five freedoms in the

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First Amendment is to redress, to have an avenue for redress to the government, not to go out and be a vigilante, but to go and the government must hear your complaint.

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It must be heard. And they did that with King George over a long period of time.

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And then they changed their legal structure to address it properly. So it was always within legal structure.

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Was it in English common law? Well, actually, I think there's 700 years of law, of British law.

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And I think there's six different documents over that period of time. You know, you might have heard that the British don't have an exact constitution.

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It's because they encompassed their entire... From the Magna Carta all the way? No, before that, the Magna Carta was the 12th century, the 1100

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Charter of Liberties is the first one. Charter of Liberties. And that one's more important because the

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Magna Carta was enforced by the sword, right, by a bunch of vigilantes.

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Okay. The 1100 Charter of Liberties was given by a king who had just taken over rule and wanted to be popular.

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So by God's grace, he says, I'm going to give you all these freedoms. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Anyway, we want to hear more about that later.

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All right. So, but last resort, I think we're starting with the last one because that's the most important. Then we go through this whole process.

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Yeah. Well, give us a list of some of the things that would qualify as a just or something happen when it's the best option, basically.

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Yeah. The only option. The first one most, most theologians would list, Christian theologians would be just cause.

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Force may be used only to correct a grave public harm, right? The cause must be just, there must be limited objectives, must protect the innocent and restore justice.

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The goal has to be to restore justice. Justice. God's justice. Yeah. And it can't be any old random justice.

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Yes. It can't be arbitrary justice. Right. So you got to have a standard for that. So that's why it's called a just war because there is a just cause that you're fighting for.

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What would be a couple of examples of a just cause or an unjust cause? I think that's where we get all bent out of shape and we don't, we don't hold

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God's justice as serious as it is. I think any violation of God's law would be a legitimate starting point.

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Maybe you don't go to war, but I think. You start addressing it in some way. Yeah. I mean, if we don't have

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Nathan's calling out David, like we always talk about, we never, we never correct any injustices and we let so many injustices just roll on.

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Why are we surprised that we have so much conflict down the road? In Israel's system, you already had the seeds of what we have here because David was not like an absolute ruler.

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He actually could resist. He could be resisted by Nathan. Nathan could hold

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God's law. So Lex Rex, the law was over the king. That's partly why people say that Bathsheba was raped by David.

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Did you ever hear that? I have heard. Only like in the last like. It's a speculation. No, it's only like the last 35 years anybody ever said that.

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And it's part of the Me Too movement. But they say, well, the king had absolute autonomy and could never be resisted.

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That wasn't the case in Israel. He was under the law. She could have cried out and the law gives reason for that.

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All that to say that in Israel, the king was not an absolute tyrant kind of authority over everything.

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You know, I might give them some credence that that could be legit, a legit thing.

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What? That it was rape. You think so? I could go that route. All right.

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Here, this is awesome. And this is a chance for me to plug something. Okay. At the conference in Wisconsin, Russell Fuller.

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I will link to that. Russell Fuller gives a whole theological and exegetical defense of why that is not rape.

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Russell Fuller was the guy that got let go from Southern Seminary. Okay. He's a

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New Old Testament scholar who they fired because he signed the Dallas statement on social justice. So when you bring up the

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Me Too movement, my head goes a different direction. So I'm thinking of their motivation behind that is that they want to think that women have autonomy in all relationships, right?

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And that they are rejecting 1 Corinthians 7, which says that the man doesn't own his own body, the woman does, and the woman doesn't own her own body, the man does.

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Which would make rape impossible in marriage. Obviously, they weren't married. Yeah. Well, it's not impossible.

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So it's outside. So it's definitely, it's, I mean, well, we know, sinful. Yeah. Adultery.

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Yeah. But there's so many linguistic reasons in the text to prove that she was also culpable.

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What they're wanting to do is they're trying to make it a power dynamic. Yeah. That it's all about victim oppressor.

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Right. And the female is by virtue and because he's king with all that power. Yeah. She couldn't have said no.

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Right. But there's plenty of reason in the scripture. Russell Fuller proves it. I think God would definitely hold her accountable.

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She was accountable. Yeah. But I mean, he might have a greater responsibility. Yeah. Of course, he's the king. Exactly. I think that's looking for something to prove your agenda.

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Yeah. We know there's an agenda. We know there's an agenda there. So give us some more. So we're talking about just war.

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Just war. So the next one is legitimate authority, which we've already talked about a little bit, but let's break that down.

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So just war, a war must serve public purposes, not merely private ones.

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Only duly constituted authorities at the highest levels of a legitimate government can make the decision to go to war.

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And I was listening to Greg Monson talk about this. Yeah. And he was talking about it in the early 90s when we had the

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Iraq war. The first Iraq war was Storming Norman Schwartzkopf going in 10 days.

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I was all for it, man. Back in the day. Well, he argued it was unjust because we really had no legitimate authority to spend

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American blood on protecting another entity when there's no attack on us.

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I would also say that, you know... So that's an example of an unjust war. Yeah.

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Well, you go to the next one, too, and this might be a subset of last resort, but formal declaration before using force, a country or entity must make a formal declaration of war and delineate its aims.

25:56

Certainly, we didn't declare war. Right. In that circumstance. Right. They haven't declared war since World War II.

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Yeah. It's always a military action. Military action. I mean, they changed the VFW name. It's not

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Veteran of Foreign Wars, it's Veteran of Foreign Conflicts. I mean, it's not official that they've changed that, but on some of their marketing, they have because there's nobody around that's fought in a war.

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Wow. You know? Yeah. The World War II generations, they're almost all gone. Yeah. There's a few left.

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Yeah. Right now. Wow. So, they've fought in that. That's a great point. Formal declaration. Right intention.

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War must be waged for a just cause, not out of... It says ethnic hatred, revenge, material gain, or power.

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The goal of war should be reconciliation and restoration of justice. But I would argue, sadly, in our country, we don't have a standard for justice anymore.

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Right. In the destruction of our republic, we've destroyed the standard of justice.

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True. Yeah, because if you don't have the scripture to inform what is right and what is wrong, how do you know?

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Yeah. You have to have an idea of what good is. If you can't define good without the scriptures, then you can just say something's good and be instituted.

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But if God's word is saying something is good and the world's calling it bad, then we're going to listen to what

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God's word says. Even if the government is promoting it, we have to stand with God rather than man.

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Right. Well, if we can encourage Christians to call out evil, then it's going to be easier for...

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I think that's what tearing down high places is all about, right? We're trying to equip people to speak up and not be passive.

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Okay, so that was right intention. This one's interesting. Probability of success.

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Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success.

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It's morally wrong to cause widespread havoc for a lost cause, even if the war is defensive.

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So, suing for peace. I mean, if you're a leader, you're called to sue for peace if, you know, you're just going to be wasting blood.

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Yeah. If you have just this tiny movement and you're facing a

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United States military or, you know, some huge superpower and you try to just rush them like Don Quixote after the windmill, like you're basically bringing your people to the slaughter and that's unjust.

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You have to have some viable possibility of success. So I had a history teacher that said, you're only a good president if you go to war.

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What? What? And he said that a lot. He said throughout history, the only good presidents were the ones that went to war.

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They all went to war. But that can't be true. Yeah. Because like, if there's no reason to go to war. Right.

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Then you're a good president if you don't go to war. My favorite president was Calvin Coolidge. They call him the do -nothing president.

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Love it. He thought the role of the president was to do as absolute little as possible. Yeah. People hate him for that, but that's what made him great.

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That's what he was. I just wonder why he said that and then told kids that the best presidents go to war.

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And I'm just wondering, why did he say that all the time? And what was making him say that? Because I never thought that was a good idea. Was this at...

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This wasn't at Cairn, right? No, this was public high school. Oh, okay. Yeah. Sorry, this is not Cairn University.

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Not Cairn University. We don't slander that with bad teachers. This was my high school history teacher.

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But this is a good place to make the point that Christians love peace. Yeah. We follow the Prince of Peace.

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We don't want war. War is a last resort. It's something when there is tyranny to save lives.

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Yeah. We might actually have to go to war, but we are peace -loving people. Yeah. And, you know,

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I think... And the Bible talks a lot about that, about you can't just force people to go to war either.

29:53

Right. You can't... Oh, yeah. You can't impress them into the military. Right, right. Yeah. You have to, you know...

29:59

And there's certain circumstances where you weren't allowed to put people in the war. You know, if someone just got married.

30:06

You couldn't force them to go. Yeah. They didn't get to go if they just bought property even. Oh, wow.

30:11

Right? Because there's a... I mean, the whole point is to protect the property of the people in the war.

30:19

Yeah. So they're being... Is there another principle? Before you read that, let me read 1 Timothy 2.

30:25

Yeah, that's a good one. 1 and 2. Go ahead. First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people.

30:32

For kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

30:42

So the first thing we do is begin to pray when we see injustice in the land.

30:47

And prayers, intercessions, thanksgiving, especially for the category of kings and rulers.

30:53

Yeah. I think... That's a good point. And, you know, as far as love and peace, there's also...

30:58

There's a godly way to wage war, right? Yeah. How you fight matters, too. How you fight matters. You don't shoot a civilian that's not taking up arms.

31:06

Exactly. Yeah. Noncombatants are verboten. Yeah. You know? And the scripture in there talks about destroying a fruit tree, right?

31:17

You're not allowed to destroy the fruit tree. Right. In normal war. In the holy war, you could.

31:23

You destroyed everything. But in the... Distinguish between those two so people know. Yeah, that's it. So there are certain types of war in the

31:31

Bible where God called out the destruction of a certain wicked people, specifically the

31:37

Canaanites, that were given God's mercy for 400 years.

31:44

Grace, they didn't deserve it. They were wickedly killing their children and... Sacrificing to the fire of Moloch.

31:50

Yeah, we have... God says to Abraham that he's warning them in some way.

31:55

We don't know how exactly. We don't have like the verse, like who he said to warn them.

32:00

But they were warned and told to repent. And unlike the Israelites. Israel goes into Egypt for 400 years, comes out, and God commands in that theocracy that they go wage a holy war and kill all

32:13

Canaanites, not leaving any of them alive. Yeah. And that's a holy war. So that theocratic war is different than a defensive war.

32:20

Yeah, yeah. Now, even though that's theocratic though, I think we should make the distinction that there was still a separation of government in there, that there was

32:28

Nathan and there was David. Right. There always was a separation. That's where we get our separation of powers.

32:34

Yeah. And we should still have power as the church. The church is still in power and the government has power.

32:40

Although... So when we're talking about just war here today, we're looking at a situation where you have an Adolf Hitler rising to power.

32:47

It's always the prototypical World War II example of a just war, right? And it's defensive.

32:52

It's not a holy war. It's a defensive war. Not a holy war, a defensive war.

32:58

And there's godly ways to wage war and not to wage war. I mean, even there's another verse that I thought was great.

33:06

That was Deuteronomy 20 .10, and where it talks about making, offering peace before going into war.

33:12

But then it says you should siege the city before ransacking it or attacking it.

33:19

And the idea there was that we're going to siege them and starve them out, which is a more godly way than shoving a sword in them.

33:32

You know? So, you know, take every last step, you know, drag it out. Yeah. You know, we don't do these things haphazardly.

33:38

Well, it makes me think about like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are a lot of civilians. Oof. Yeah.

33:45

But you saved a lot of life too because you didn't have to continue with the war. I think you killed some fruit trees.

33:50

I think you killed some fruit trees. That's the problem, yeah. No, that's a tough one. Scorched earth. Yeah. Scorched earth.

33:56

Scorched earth, yeah. Kind of like Sherman's march to the sea. That was horrible. Yeah. That was wicked. Yeah. So what do you guys think?

34:02

Because the Bible talks about how it should be men and 20 years and older to fight.

34:09

Do you think that should still be true today? Oh. Like, what do we think about women fighting? I've got my daughter.

34:15

Sorry to throw that out there, but. I've got my daughter convinced that she should not go to war. Okay. That was not a hard press.

34:24

I didn't have to convince her. It seemed like kind of natural. And children should not be fighting in war in general. It shouldn't be allowed ever.

34:30

You shouldn't strap bombs to them. Yeah. And run them out. Exactly. And what do we think about that though?

34:36

That's just something I'm curious about. Well, I think we shouldn't wait until we get to that level of evil before we start calling out wickedness.

34:42

We got to call out wickedness now. Our culture has no foundation of what evil is.

34:50

So in the book of Judges, you have a female kind of leading into the war,

34:56

Deborah. But the whole point of that story is that Barak was unwilling to step up as a man and fight and lead that war.

35:05

And so God even then sends just a random housewife woman to drive a tent peg, Jael, into the head of the king, the wicked king.

35:13

So he kills the king with a woman doing the killing. But this is actually judgment on Barak and on Israel because they have now female leaders and fighters because their men are not stepping up as men.

35:29

So it says in 1 Corinthians 16, quit ye like men, be strong. Act like men, be strong.

35:34

Part of masculinity is to be the ones to go be on the front line, battle in the war. And so it's kind of really a judgment on the lack of male masculinity in a culture that you have an army with female fighters.

35:48

So that shouldn't be something to be proud about that Deborah had to do it. That's something to be embarrassed about. Yep. If you read the whole passage, that's the thread that comes out.

35:57

And just the kind of level of not even female soldiers, but men who act like women in the

36:09

Yeah. That's a sign of weakness. You think that's going to be the undoing of the American military, right? Oh, 100%. Yeah.

36:15

Because already creeping in. How can you, how can a foe, how could China or Iran fear a military who's just completely concerned about DEI instead of being war ready?

36:26

And it's completely feeding into the Hegelian dialectic, which we talk about all the time. Right. You know, so we're going to go so far that we're going to transgender and what has everyone capitulated on because of that?

36:39

They see no difference between transgenderism and homosexuality. Yeah. Total capitulation. All right.

36:44

We'll give you homosexuality. Just please stop chopping our children apart with your surgeries to change their gender.

36:53

So -called. Abraham Kuyper saw this in 1898. I just recently read the stone lectures that he gave at Princeton.

37:00

He was like the prime minister up in the Netherlands. I think it was or might've been another

37:06

Scandinavian country, but he was also a Christian theologian and they invited him to come to Princeton and talk about this.

37:13

And he said, modernism is making man into woman and woman into man.

37:19

Wow. And he said in placing everything under the ban of uniform and destroying life by placing everything under the ban of enforced, like uniformity, that everything has to become equal, even men and women.

37:31

Well, he didn't see in 1898 that in 2023 or 2024 now, you'd literally have men trying to become women and women physically trying to become men that couldn't even have entered his mind back then.

37:43

But he saw the direction of rejecting the Christian ethic for everything has to be equal, everything, eliminating all distinctions.

37:51

So Tim, to answer your question, I think there is a distinction between masculinity and femininity and one of those things is that men should go to war.

37:59

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. Just wanted to get some more perspective on that. Yeah. Not this man, but...

38:06

You don't want to go to war? Yeah. I'm too old. So I love peace.

38:11

Jesus taught me to love peace. That's right. And that's fine too. That's okay too, right? We want peace.

38:17

We want peace. We really do. But yeah, there's just war. So we're really running out of time. Do we want to take this to a second episode and go through specific wars?

38:26

Or do you think we... I think the Revolutionary War, we've implied the answer so much there that it might be redundant next week, in my opinion.

38:34

Okay. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll try to find a guest to come along. So was the Revolutionary War a just war? Oh, absolutely. It was the doctrine of the lesser magistrates where you have the

38:43

Black Robe Regiment, the preachers are preaching the truth of what's right and wrong, teaching the people the ethics in the public square, showing the wickedness.

38:52

But it was the governors themselves and all the leaders of the colonies who together declared war,

38:58

Declaration of Independence. And it met the criteria as you read it out.

39:04

Yes, it did. It did. All right. And also, just a couple more things. Two quick things because I know we're out of time. Yeah. But one is the providence...

39:10

As you look back on it, the providence of God on America and the fruit that's come from it. Now, you don't want to get into ends justify the means, but there is a certain sowing and reaping principle.

39:19

When you see the fruit of America and the good that... It's been the greatest force for good in the history of the world.

39:26

You're telling me that it was by an unjust war that the greatest country in the history of the world came into being?

39:32

Now, we're wasting it now. We're giving it away since the mid -1900s. But it's still evident that God's hand...

39:39

Plus, when you look at the providences of how we won that war, George Washington on a horseback, bullets four times pierced his clothes, killed two horses, every other officer laying dead, and he just rides off.

39:53

Right. How? You read some of these histories and the miracles that preserved his life. On Staten Island, they had 8 ,000 soldiers, 15 ,000 and caught on that peninsula.

40:04

15 ,000 English soldiers on one side, 42 ,000 on the other. And all of a sudden, it just got overtaken with fog in the night, and they slipped out and got on boats and escaped

40:15

Staten Island. There would have been the end of the Revolutionary War right there. And time and again, the miracles of the revolution, just God providentially bringing the victory to the

40:25

Americans. It's hard to see it any other way. It's obvious. They said they had bloody footprints in the snow.

40:32

Yes. On the way from Valley Forge to Trenton. Yep. Crazy. Yeah, God did it.

40:38

Incredible. Amen. All right, man. Well, if you guys see a brother down, lift them up.