July 3, 2019 Show with Lou Veiga on “Tyranny: Its Cause & Cure”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the Church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this third day of July 2019.

I always love going to really biblically solid Bible conferences. That's one of my life's passions, especially when

I can share with others what I am doing for a living, and that is hosting

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. That's one of the things I do for a living anyway. And when

I meet people at these conferences that would be ideal guests, I'm even more thankful to God that I attended those events.

And such is the case with the last Banner of Truth conference that I attended in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

While I was relaxing in the lobby during a break between speaking sessions, my friend

Bill Hill, who is a pastor in Tennessee, and he is no stranger to the

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listening audience because he's been a guest on my program on a number of occasions.

But Bill directed me to my guest today. He said, you've got to meet

Lou Vega, and you've got to interview Lou Vega. And after sitting down with Lou, Pastor Lou, I was convinced that this may be one of the times that Bill Hill is right about something.

And I actually immediately knew that Bill Hill was absolutely right about this.

I was utterly riveted to every word coming out of Lou Vega's mouth, and I immediately invited him to be my guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And I'm glad that this day has finally come. And what a perfect day, the day before the 4th of July, Independence Day, to be discussing the theme,

Tyranny, Its Cause and Cure. That is our theme today with Lou Vega, Senior Pastor of Covenant Church in Houston, Texas, which is a congregation within the

PCA, Presbyterian Church in America. And Lou was born in Cuba and fled with his family to America after Fidel Castro's communist revolution and takeover of Cuba.

And it is obviously very fitting that he discusses a theme like the one we are addressing today,

Tyranny, Its Cause and Cure. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Lou Vega.

Well, Chris, it's a distinct pleasure and a privilege. And I must say, I've already had my 4th of July fireworks by that introduction.

I've never seen so many sparks come up. It's exhilarating.

I can't wait to meet the fellow that you're introducing. Well, I don't think that I'm exaggerating in the slightest bit.

I will say this. You have excellent taste and friends. Bill Hill is a wonderful man, and he's been a friend of mine since seminary.

And I greatly esteem his friendship. Also, by the way, Cal Beisner says hello and greets you.

So you've got two friends. Oh, great. Were you speaking to Cal very recently? Well, I copied him on the notice that was going to appear on your show.

And so he says, oh, by all means, please greet him in my name. So, yeah, he's a great person. In fact, that reminds me.

Cal emailed me when I was away on a trip. I just got back from Tennessee myself,

Franklin, Tennessee. And, in fact, before that I was in Birmingham, Alabama, and after that I was in Greensboro, North Carolina.

But Cal emailed me asking if I wanted to interview him again, and I've got to get back in touch with him.

Oh, yeah. Cal is one of my favorite people to speak with. He has such a magnificent mind and a great and gentlemanly spirit and manner about him.

The best place to catch him, however, and I'm sure he'll be shocked if he's listening in, is basically to worm your way into his neighborhood and house.

And that way you can catch him around the kitchen table with his lovely wife and have just a sit -down talk with some of the best people,

I think, one of the most thoughtful people in the world. I just greatly esteem Cal Bison. Well, the next time I'm in Florida, I will have to try to worm my way into his house, as you say.

Well, before we go into your personality, your personal testimony, is what

I meant to say, before we go into that, because as many of our listeners know, that is a tradition on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

Whenever we have a first -time guest, we have that guest give their personal salvation story.

But before we do that, tell our listeners something about Covenant Church in Houston, Texas. Well, we're in the

Energy Corridor, which makes us almost a suburb. It once was a suburb of Houston, you might say, but the city has just kept growing and expanding.

So now we find ourselves pretty much in West Houston and the city all around us.

And it has a—well, it's an amazing place to be as a pastor because of the very many nationalities and languages that are here.

I mean, in our own small church—I'll say our church is 175. That's a strong—that's still a small church.

But in there, we've got, I think, 18 different language groups or people groups. And many of those people speak four or five different languages because they're from African tribes.

And they've traveled a bit in Europe and all that goes. So it is a very, very diversified church.

And I love it that way. I've always enjoyed metropolitan areas because of the variety of peoples and customs, and especially food.

You know, I like food. And so the challenge here is, of course, being so biblical that you don't offend one culture or another.

And so that's what we try to do. You know, the Lord God, in his Bible, he lifts up his servant

Jesus. And his servant Jesus says, you know, if I be lifted up, then I will draw all men to myself.

And that's my business. My business is to lift up the Lord Jesus in all of his glory as the

God -man. And be pure to his calling. And, well, leave the results with him.

But I am convinced that Houston is like a microcosm of the world. The world has come into us, and we're very uniquely positioned here to seize that opportunity and be faithful in the

Lord and really make an impact. And that's what we want to do. We want to glorify the

Lord, and in so doing, bring him and his gospel to bear here in the lives of people, the

Estonians. One thing that I might want to ask, just because the

PCA, amongst the conservative branches of Presbyterianism, since it's so large, there is more of a spectrum of diversity, even though I would say everyone who is still in good standing with the

PCA is biblically sound and confessionally solid.

But I would have, obviously, varying degrees of disagreement from congregation to congregation. And I also, being a

Reformed Baptist, disagree with some of my Reformed Baptist friends who are pastors and what some things their churches may believe and practice.

But if you could give us a description of where your church would land in the orbit of the

PCA, would you tend to be a lot more on the conservative side, and the views about the involvement of women in leadership and all these things that you might want to address?

Well, yes. I know where you're coming from, because the framework, the political analysis, the social -political analysis of the

PCA, all the terminologies everyone has on everyone's minds. I would say that I don't know too many other churches that are as conservative, or at least wanting to be as conservative as we are.

The reason is, and that's not a bragging point, and that's why I don't like this framework.

I just don't like conservative versus liberal. What I like to say is this, that if a person is as carefully, if he's carefully exegeting the

Scriptures, then that is the truth of the Holy Spirit, and that truth is eternal.

And there can be nothing more progressive, nothing more futuristic, nothing more at the very nosecone of the progress of the human race, than God's truth.

We've got to get at the truth. And then as it spills out, however in the political spectrum we lie, you know, it'll be that.

I mean, in Calvin's Geneva, in the time of Geneva, we would have been ultra -liberals along with Calvin.

But, I mean, as far as Southern Presbyterianism here in the United States, I would position this church, or at least what

I want as a leader in the church, what I want to see is, I would position it mainstream, conservative, 19th century

Southern Presbyterian. And if you know what that is, I'm right in the middle of the road there in the 19th century.

I like to think of myself as a son of Westminster, recognizable to the divines of Westminster.

I would like to think of myself as one conducting a worship service where if Calvin were to visit, he'd say, wow, this is strangely reminiscent of home in Geneva, and also perhaps of what he heard was going on in Scotland and other places in the world.

In other words, I am strictly aiming at Catholicity in the capital

C sense of the word. And we arrive at that by being the greatest, the best biblicists we can.

So whether that falls in one way or another in the PCA, it seems to be always consistently in the far -right conservative spectrum.

However, I may shock some people in some of the things that I say, because I will jolt them.

In terms of, for instance, most conservative confessional people that I know do not see the value of changing our confession.

And I love the Westminster Confession. I'm a son of the Confession and its assembly.

However, we've got a problem in that the Church today must confess its faith as it sees it in the

Scriptures. And then confessing that faith, we must keep it. We must show it.

We must say what we mean and mean what we say. And I think there's just a lot of complications that have come about as to what we mean by confessionalism.

And that's a shame. I follow, I hope, the intent of the divines in their writings.

And so in the PCA terms, I would be called a strict subscriptionist. And I have to forbear with others that see things differently.

And so that's what we do for the peace of the denomination. That's what I do. But really, I'm a

Southern Presbyterian a la Thornwell. Oh, wow. I love

Thornwell. Yeah. And I miss him, of course. When I read him, I like him still. Just out of curiosity,

I don't want to get you in too much trouble. But Thornwell was one of the few, at least today, he's a voice amongst the few

Presbyterians that did not believe in accepting Roman Catholic baptism as valid.

I was just wondering where you stood on that. Yeah, well, I can speak to that in my own personal experience.

And my personal conviction on this is as follows. I mean, before the

Council of Trent, it was murky, because there was still a connectedness there and a relationship to the

Vatican and the Holy Roman Catholic Church. After the

Council of Trent, I mean, it became obvious that they anathematized true believers.

And in their wording, they didn't get it wrong. They actually understood what was being said by the

Lutherans. And yet they really detested it. They really detested it.

And so in that breach, I would say that that's no gospel church.

However, again, there's a mystery of iniquity. Truth does not die that easily.

And I will say this, and I'm sure you're going to get some calls on this, Chris, but I know that in the

Catholic Mass, there is enough of the rudiments of the gospel, such as in the

Creed, when it's recited. If anyone in their heart really believes the Apostles, you know,

Creed, well, I mean, in their heart, spiritually speaking, then there's a good chance that they are a

Christian. But then they take away so many things with the right hand as they did with the left that we've got this quandary.

You leave the room thinking, well, what? Are they Hindu? Do they believe two gods? Is this gospel right and another one the same, the gospel of Mary saving?

You know, because Mary is co -mediatrix, along with our mediator

Christ. So it's a bundle of confusion. And that's one of the reasons

I had to leave. I was confused and I was in despair, but that's in my testimony. Right.

Well, that specific topic, actually, if anybody wants to hear my friend Jeff Waddington's take on that very issue of Thornwell's non -acceptance of Roman Catholic baptism, which

Jeff Waddington agreed with, you can look up in the archives of ironsherpensirenradio .com. Do you know

Jeff, by the way? He's an Orthodox Presbyterian minister. No, I don't know him. I didn't answer the question, no.

I would back off from being in complete agreement with Thornwell in that I would say this, that probably today most

Roman Catholic baptisms should be examined and set aside by the churches simply because the baptism is a seal of those that are being discipled, and if one is not being discipled in the word, then the seal really has no significance.

I mean, the commission is to go on to all the world, baptizing and teaching, and the two are inexorably next together.

So we have to examine if there was a culture, if there was a womb of spiritual nourishment on a systematic basis, and it may be possible in some places to find a

Roman Catholic community doing things like that. So I don't rule it out absolutely, but I check it out.

But of course if someone was baptized and that was a mere formalism and no other development was done, no other teaching in the home, no other teaching in the church, then

I would say, honestly, that was just...

But I would always ask the person. And the remarkable thing is when I was a volunteer chaplain at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, I volunteered as a chaplain there for 14 years,

I would go in and hold Bible studies and exhort in Spanish. And quite frequently this question came up to me, and oftentimes

I would say, you know, if you were brought before the Lord in baptism and his name was placed on you, well, wouldn't you know it?

Here you are before one of his elders. I was a ruling elder at that time, not a minister. Here you are in front of the gospel and hearing it.

I don't know. I don't think that's a coincidence for sure. Maybe he's still acting on his promises.

So in other words, what I'm saying is there's a degree of complexity here that, as for practice,

I leave these difficult issues up to my session to iron out one way or the other. Yeah.

We have answered. And every case has to be discussed on an individual basis. Right.

And, of course, Thornwell's arguments were not isolated to the

Church of Rome being a false church. It was the ceremony itself. The rite has been changed from the biblical practice.

Even though there is a name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit being cited in the rite, there are other things going on.

There are saints being prayed to and all kinds of things.

You're really being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, not into Christ. So there's a lot of things going on there. Yeah, I think you're right.

But I have heard from a Protestant service where, along with the water, a white rose was presented to the parents at the infant's baptism.

And John Gerstner, our beloved professor now deceased, spoke on that and challenged that church.

You know, what does the water represent? Well, it's the washings. And, you know, what does the white rose represent? Well, the purity.

Well, there is no purity here, you know. I mean, so, in other words, we're prone.

We're very, very prone. All denominations, if we're not watchful, we are prone to lose not just the purity of the sacrament and the ordinance of baptism, but other aspects of worship, other aspects of worship.

Amen. Well, we will maybe return to that topic at a future interview, but right now

I'd like you to begin your summary of your own salvation testimony.

I know that you were born in Cuba. Tell our listeners what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in and what kind of providential circumstances rose up in your life that drew you to Christ and saved you and even led you to the

Reformed faith. Right. Well, that's pretty much what I have in mind as an outline.

And that's a very natural next step from what we just were talking about. We were talking about Roman Catholic piety, and it just so happens that, see,

I'm second generation Spanish blood, not Cuban. I'm born of Cuban soil, but I am second generation removed from Spain.

My grandmother on my mother's side was Spanish, and she and her sister came here to Cuba to the

New World, basically getting away from what? Pyrenees, from Franco and some of the economic difficulties and political difficulties in Spain at that time.

And Francisco Franco was in allegiance to the Nazis at one point. Absolutely. He was a great friend.

Yeah. And he was a nationalist, you know, and he was a lot of trouble. You can read the narrative of what was going on there.

Basically, the police had prosecuting and judicatory and, you know, they could terminate a life, too.

They were their own circuit court judges and executors on the spot. It was a tyranny.

But anyway, they came here, and my grandmother's natural mother had died.

Their father remarried, and her father and the new mother came to the

New World. The new mother did not like Cuba. It was not at all what she was expecting.

So she influenced her husband to move back to Spain, leaving the two girls, and the girls were 13 and 9.

And they were brought up by nuns. They were brought up in a nunnery, and they were brought up along the lines of strict orders.

In other words, their upbringing was so written in the character and habits of my grandmother that she kept hours for her rosary.

And so that influenced my mother. My mother was a godly woman as far as the

Roman Catholic faith was concerned. She was a pure woman. She was alarmed when she grew up.

By the way, she had two doctoral degrees. She taught at the University of Havana Medical School and had degrees in pharmacology and in optometry.

And so by the time she was 26, she had two doctorates, and that's pretty clever for a

Latino woman in the 1950s. But she was amazed at the looseness of her peers, her friends, female friends, moral looseness.

And it was a great heartache to her to find out so many women that had compromised their purity and all that.

Cuba was a very central place in the 50s and had been for a while.

But I say that because that's the womb of our family growing up, first for a little bit in Miami, then

Minnesota, and then back to Miami. I mean, we were steady churchgoers. We were weekly mass and also parochial school every year of my life, except first grade, even through high school parochial schooling.

So my parents believed in sticking close to the church.

And so, but then the

Lord has a way of intervening here. And what happened was in 1974 my mother got cancer, was diagnosed with cancer, and the colon, and by the time things got to the doctor, they'd marched along too seriously, so the mother died.

And that really was a real blow to me.

I know in your own life that you miss your wife. I think you said she's what, six or eight years,

Chris? Actually, yes, eight years, 2011. And, you know, you feel the sting of that.

Well, you feel the sting of it, but you have the comfort. You have the hope of the resurrection. You have certainty.

The Catholic Church doesn't really deal with certainties.

It deals with sort of a wispy hope, you know. The best thing you can do is basically, you know, keep on praying for the dead, which was hard.

All of the masses for the dead, frankly, were hard on me because they were well -intentioned, but it's just never -ending, and you never get a sure word until possibly one of the popes declares, look, it appears that the soul is in a purgatory, but something extraordinary has to happen for that.

But at the time of her death, I was at the University of Miami studying electrical engineering, and I was a very fine student, but this event of my mother's passing drew my attention away from my books to really the ultimate problem, and that is what in the world is going on here.

I mean, I could do all the problems in the back of the book in my calculus book, and, you know, organic chemistry even was not entirely difficult for me.

But as for solving the matters of life, death, purpose, even with my parochial school education,

I mean, the best thing we could do, I think, is, you know, Viktor Frankl's search for meaning. I mean, wow. I need something a little bit stronger than that.

So I was left with ache and bordering on real despair and depression. I think the way

I coped was to stay busy. You know, I was in school, but I was working 20 and 30 hours, and on the weekends

I would fish or do anything. I would just keep active, keep on the move. And I think a lot of people just delay the inevitable just by, well, following the flittering feathers all around you, just keep following whatever is blowing in from the wind, and don't deal with a monster, a monster of ache and despair in your own heart and soul.

But after this, I did finish my degree, and I finished well, so I got an engineering job at IBM in Kentucky.

And, you know, the Lord is so gracious. It wasn't too long after he got me out of my exceedingly busyness in Miami, my extreme affection for fishing and snorkeling and the reefs and all that,

I just found myself yearning for the Florida Keys after I moved to Kentucky.

But after I settled in, I got an office mate, and his name was

Noel Edwards. And he was a Christian man, a fine Christian man. And his life showed that he was truly

Christian. He was kind. He was hospitable. He shared his life with me, his friendship.

He would invite me over. Whenever he knew I was single and he knew that, basically,

I was searching. I had not given up completely. At that time, I think, by the time

Noel became my office mate, I believe I was reading some

Eastern literature and finding the same irrational inconsistencies in those approaches as I had found studying psychology on my own when

I was in high school. I read most of Freud and Jung and Maslow and Rogers and everything else.

I was deeply impressed at that time to find some kind of explanation as to why people behave the way they do.

I don't think my motives were altogether altruistic. But, nevertheless,

I was still very confused. But I abandoned that as well. He gave me a 25 -cent used copy of The Good News for Modern Man.

Have you seen it? Remember the book? When I was a Catholic elementary school student, we had to tell our parents that they had to buy us a copy, and it remained in our desks in Catholic school unopened.

The nuns told us we had to get it because it was Vatican II time, but we never used it.

Oh, man. Oh, man. Well, you see, he got me reading it, you see. And then

I stumbled. In my reading, especially the Gospels, I had read enough teachers of all sorts of thought to know that no one had ever said anything so outlandish as this.

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

I mean, in all my reading, I had not met any... I know that writing is out there.

False prophets say these kinds of things. The Lord spared me from that. But in terms of reading the

Scriptures and having a man say that and then having a life to sustain that claim, I said, okay,

I'm home. That's it. That's it. I'm home. All my eggs, one basket. I'm going with Jesus.

That's that. And I started attending a Nazarene church, which was very fiery and very revivalistic, and Pastor David McCracken was at the helm there.

And Pastor McCracken had two sermons. It was get saved and get sanctified, because he was a primitive

Wesleyan and Nazarene. And the get saved, I got it right.

You know, and he got it right. And I remember one

Sunday, I think it was the first time I'd visited Lafayette Nazarene Church there in Lexington, Kentucky.

I think it was an Easter Sunday, because if there's any Sunday that's going to nab a Catholic to go to church, it would be that one.

And Noel Edwards knew that, so he invited me. And, you know, I walked into the auditorium, and as I'm walking in,

I see the people, you know, preparing for worship.

But not as Catholics prepare. I mean, we come in, we cross ourselves, genuflect, and take a seat, shut up.

But they were busy talking and hugging, and the merriment and the laughter and the joy was like,

I've never seen this before. What is going on? I thought this was church. Why are they so happy?

I said to myself. Well, and then I remembered. Chris, I remembered.

It's Easter. It's the resurrection. He's alive. He's alive, and that's why they're happy.

And that point on, from that point, the skies above me cleared.

It felt like the clouds parted, and there was sunshine. In fact, we're going to pick up right where you left off there when we return from our first break.

I want you to continue the story and how you eventually embraced the Reformed faith, and also how you entered into the ministry.

But please, if you have a question for Lou Vega, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Lou Vega and our theme for today,

Tyranny, Its Cause and Its Cure. Don't go away. Tyranny, Its Cause and Its Cure As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

Grace Covenant Baptist Church believes it's God's prerogative to determine how He shall be worshipped and how

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God -centered focus. Reading, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, baptism, and communion are the scriptural elements of their corporate worship, performed with faith, joy, and sobriety.

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Tell Pastor Dunn that you heard about Grace Covenant Baptist Church on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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That's Solid -Ground -Books .com We are now back with our guest today, Lou Vega. He is pastor of Covenant Church, which is a

PCA congregation in Houston, Texas. That's Presbyterian Church in America. And he's also a native

Cuban who fled with his family to America after Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution took over Cuba.

Today we are addressing tyranny, its cause, and its cure. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

And before the break, you were talking about how you were at an Easter service at a

Nazarene church. I believe it was in Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. And you were seeing people just filled with genuine joy, very often something that you don't necessarily see in your mainline churches, or especially the

Roman Catholic Church. I don't really remember exuberant joy being an element of my Catholic experience when

I was attending Mass as a child. But you were wondering about why are these people behaving this way, and it dawned on you the meaning of Easter, and if you want to pick up where you left off.

Yeah, Chris, yes. I have to think we under appreciate the value of the church, the church's witness, the people's witness, in the assembly.

Before anything came at me from the pulpit that Sunday, the people of God themselves were a light to me because of their very demeanor, the light of God's face shown on their lights, on their faces.

So, and the element that I detected was the element that I was desperate to find, and that was joy.

I mean, that is what would, that is the balm that would meet and cure my ache and my despair.

So, I say, oh, I did want to say this, that I started attending there because the people were lovely and they were very friendly, and the

Noah Edwards family was amazing. They're still friends of mine. They visited here in Houston after all these years.

But I want to say that Noah's wife, Sarah, was the manager of a

Christian book store, I think it was called Cornerstone, in south Lexington, Kentucky. And so she took me in there and was very kind to point out a set of commentaries that she insisted would be very helpful to me, and those were the six -volume

Heartbound Matthew Henry. And all the things, you know, for a Nazarene to recommend what

I would call a very, very Thurgoing Puritan author.

But you see, the thing was, the Nazarenes, they had a nose for holiness. And they didn't,

I mean, they weren't systematicians. They didn't know how you got to holiness. And they didn't, the methods prescribed for seeking holiness,

I wouldn't agree with them. And probably nobody on the air today would. Being entirely sanctified and no sin within, no sin without, that was a quote from Reverend McCracken.

I had to disagree with that, but their desire for holiness now, their thirst for it, well, yes, that is the heart of Matthew Henry.

And so I saw that in the Church, and I was reading Matthew Henry, and I was reading it very, very copiously, and you know, you just got out of a commercial spot with solid ground.

You know, the thing that distinguishes the Reformed from other previous churches is the availability of the printed word in the hands of the lazy.

Here I am, a young engineer at IBM, I've got some income, and in Matthew Henry's day, it would have taken an entire annual salary of a worker, of a regular day laborer to own a set of commentaries here.

I bought it, you know, probably less than two hours of labor. So, here

I have in my hands this treasure, and I'm just lapping it up.

I would leave work on Friday afternoons, and I lived on the city reservoir.

I lived on a lake, and I had a sailboat, and I had a lot of friends. We could go over and do all sorts of things, and I loved fishing, as I already alluded to from my days in Miami.

But I would come into my apartment, and I would read. I would read the

Bible, and I would read Matthew Henry, and I would be on my knees, and I discovered what these various lexicons were about, and so I could not leave that.

I emerged on Sunday morning for church, and then I went back into my hermitage, and then

I came out on Sunday evenings for Sunday night worship, and that was my weekend for three years.

I mean, I had so many answers. I mean, I got so many questions, and I had to get so many answers, especially back to my family.

But I'll just say this quick reference back to Cuba. When I explained to my father that I was

Presbyterian, I found my way to a Reformed church, eventually. When I announced to him that I was

Presbyterian, my father didn't, he didn't, he didn't wink at all, because he knew who that was, and it turns out that his father was brought up in Cárdenas, in Cuba, and Cárdenas was majority

Presbyterian. It was United Presbyterian, but majority Presbyterian. They had a fine church, and they had a

Christian school, and nearly all of my grandfather's, my paternal grandfather's friends were

Presbyterian. So my father knew that that was Christian, that they were good people, and honorable people, and they honored the

Lord, and that when he came to my ordination, you know, shortly after my ordination service here in Houston, the first thing he told me after the service was, you know,

Lou, this service is exactly, exactly the service

I remember in Cárdenas in the 1940s. Wow. Yeah, it's really, it tickled me, it tickled me much.

So, anyway, I did find my way, mostly by reading. There was a fellow, an engineer, who had been attending a church plant at that time, it was called

Tate's Creek. It was a mission church at the PCA. His name was Michael Maubacher. He was later to go into the ministry, but anyway,

I was walking down the halls, and he said, Lou, here's some reading for you this week, and I said, okay, let's do it. He gave me a copy of the election by Spurgeon.

It was a sermon, it was in loose leaf. I think he mimeographed it, or we would say xerox -copied, but really photocopied it.

And it was 90 pages. And I took it home and I immediately read through it, and was sitting, and I gave it back to him the next

Monday, and he says, well, Lou, what do you think? And I said, oh, hey, super. Wherever this guy

Spurgeon is, man, he's yeah, he's got it. He says, what, do you agree with this? And I said, what's there to disagree about?

I said, I'm looking, and I'm like, that's what the Bible says. Who would disagree with it? He goes, well, well, you're a

Presbyterian, and I said, I don't care! Anyway, I'll tell you what,

I found my home in the Presbyterian church when I heard Pastor Al Lutz, who was a church planter at the time in Lexington, he was preaching through the book of Genesis.

And in that series, as he handled the life of Jacob, I really understood,

I saw myself in Jacob. Okay? Kind of sheltered and kind of spoiled, selfish, self -centered, and a trickster of sorts, you know, getting his way by navigating through life, you know, using his wit.

But, you know, I said, if the Lord can save this kind of guy, you know, and he's one of the patriarchs, well, now

I know what grace is. Okay, well, maybe I'm in that circle. I really began to savor grace through the

Reformed preaching of the doctrines of grace as applied, as understood in Scripture. It's one thing to read the epistles and get, you know, the forensic justification and all that stuff.

Fine, fine, fine. But really, and I love all this stuff. Okay, I love the languages.

I'm a Greek and a Hebrew exegete. I love languages, and I cut my teeth on systematics when

I found out what they really were after that. But, there is something about the life of God and the life of a man and how he's dealing with a soul, and how that is a witness in the world that is very, very winsome in Jacob's life to me.

And his steady progress, the Lord brings him up and is an old man. He is that man of God that God had called him to be by the time his bones were laid to rest back in Canaan.

So, anyway, the Reformed faith was home for me. I could rest in a

God that saves sinners. And that was a great, great relief to me. Well, praise

God. We have to go to our midway break right now. This is a little longer than a normal break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because they air their own public service announcements and local

Florida commercials while we air our global commercials. So, please take the time to use this break wisely by writing questions for Lou Vega, and also use this time to write down the information provided by our advertisers because the more information that you have ready for our advertisers, the more likely you will be able to successfully and frequently patronize them, which means subsequently, we will be more likely remaining on the air for a longer period in the future because our advertisers will be able to stick around if they have more funding from your patronage.

So, please contact our sponsors as often as you can and patronize them.

And also, write down your questions for Lou Vega at chrisarnson at gmail .com

chrisarnson at gmail .com Don't go away, we're going to be right back with Lou Vega right after these messages from our sponsors.

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That's chrisarnson at gmail dot com Hello, my name is

James Renahan and I'm the president of IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas. The Word of God says,

If a man desires the office of an overseer, he desires a good thing. Do you have the desire to serve

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S's in the middle. I hope to hear from you soon. God bless you. Hi, this is

John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnson and the

Iron Sharpens Iron podcast. I consider Chris a true friend and a man of high integrity. He's a skilled interviewer who's not afraid to ask the big penetrating questions while always defending the key doctrines of the

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I believe this podcast needs to be heard far and wide. This is a day of great spiritual compromise and yet God has raised

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I'm pleased to do so and would like to ask you to prayerfully consider joining me in supporting

Iron Sharpens Iron financially. Would you consider sending either a one -time gift or even becoming a regular monthly partner with this ministry?

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If you just want the True Love book, you can purchase any amount of merchandise. Before we return to Lou Vega and our discussion on tyranny, its cause and its cure,

I just have a couple of brief announcements regarding upcoming events. This December, the 19th and the 20th,

I am going to be heading back to my old stomping grounds in New York City to the Foundations Conference.

This is a conference conducted by sermonaudio .com, and it is always a phenomenal conference, and I can't wait to be there.

The speakers include Dr. Stephen J. Lawson, founder of One Passion Ministries, Paul Washer, one of the finest preachers on the planet

Earth, Rev. Jeff Thomas, truly an extraordinary man of God that most Reformed people will recognize,

Rev. Armin Tomasian, a brother I believe who will be a household name amongst

Reformed Christians over the next decade. He is just an extraordinary young man with gifts and abilities far beyond his youth, and I strongly urge you to hear

Rev. Tomasian whenever you have the opportunity. Richard Caldwell Jr.

and Andrew Quigley are two names on the roster I have never heard preached before, but if sermonaudio picked them, they must be magnificent.

So, if you'd like to join me there, Thursday and Friday, December 19th and 20th in New York City, go to thefoundationsconference .com,

thefoundationsconference .com, and register. And I am really looking forward to it, especially since this will be during the

Christmas season, and I can't think of a better place to be during the Christmas season than New York City. Then in January, I am packing up my bags again and heading down south to Atlanta, Georgia, more specifically

College Park, Georgia, to the Georgia International Convention Center for the G3 Conference.

The three G's stand for Gospel, Grace, and Glory, and this January's theme is

Worship Matters. The speakers include a really phenomenal lineup, as always.

This January, they are Kosti Hinn, whose name you may recognize, you may recognize his last name, unfortunately for a horrible reason.

His uncle is the notorious charlatan Benny Hinn, the word of faith heretic, and Kosti Hinn would not be upset hearing me say that about his uncle because Kosti Hinn has made it a mission in his life to expose his uncle and those promoting the word of faith heresy for the charlatans they are, and for the deadly and damning doctrines that they promote.

Kosti Hinn has repented of the word of faith heresy. He is now a Reformed Baptist pastor and a cessationist in California, and he is on the roster of this

Worship Matters conference that the G3 conference is conducting. Also, David Miller, a really fine, powerful preacher of the gospel.

Derek Thomas, someone who I'm sure the vast majority of our listeners recognize, a very well known name amongst

Reformed Christians. My friend since 1995, Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be on the roster.

Joel Beeky, another friend of mine since the 1990s, president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

Josh Bice, who is the founder of the G3 conference. Again, we have Stephen J. Lawson and Paul Washer on the roster at this conference.

My friend, Dr. Tom Askell, who is the executive director of Founders Ministries, the Calvinistic ministry within the

Southern Baptist Convention. And Vody Baucom, a man that is just one of the finest and most extraordinary preachers and teachers alive on the planet

Earth, in my opinion. If you would like to register, go to g3conference .com g3conference .com

I also strongly urge you not only to register to attend, but if you have a business or a parachurch organization,

I urge you to register for an exhibitors booth just like I will be manning for Iron Troupe and Zion Radio, because the

G3 conference draws crowds of over 5 ,000 people every year, so it's an ideal place to have an exhibitors booth.

And I hope to have the occasion to have some of my listeners manning exhibitors booths right near mine.

It would be great to see you there. That's g3conference .com Thursday, January 16th through Saturday, January 18th 2020.

And once again, the theme is Worship Matters. That's g3conference .com And last but not least, if you love

Iron Troupe and Zion Radio, you do not want us to disappear from the airwaves. You have extra money in your checking account or savings account that you use for benevolent purposes, then please, if you love us, don't let us go away.

Please donate as frequently as you can and as heavily as you can at irontroupeandzionradio .com

Click support, then click, click to donate now. That's irontroupeandzionradio .com. Click support, then click, click to donate now.

You can donate instantly with a debit or credit card. You can also mail in a check via snail mail.

Make out the check to Iron Troupe and Zion Radio and send it to the address that appears on your screen when you click support at irontroupeandzionradio .com

The caveats that I remind you of every day is please never siphon money away from your regular giving to your local church where you are a member in order to give to Iron Troupe and Zion Radio.

Never do that. Never put your family in financial jeopardy by giving to Iron Troupe and Zion Radio. But if you are financially blessed above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, you have extra money for benevolent purposes, charitable purposes, and you love this show, you don't want us to go away, then please help us.

We are in urgent need. We are in more urgent need than ever before. We are just squeaking by with most of our bills for July and August is looking very scary now.

Please help us out. And if you want to advertise, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line.

We will help you launch an ad campaign immediately as long as whatever it is you want to promote is compatible with what we believe.

You don't have to believe identically with me, but you need to be promoting something that's compatible with what I believe and speak about and do interviews on here on Iron Troupe and Zion Radio.

Also, if you are not a member of a Bible -believing church and you're not prayerfully seeking for one, you are living in rebellion against God.

So please rectify that situation. If you need help finding a church, I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world and I've already helped a number of listeners in the

Iron Troupe and Zion Radio audience find churches near them in all parts of the world where they have joined those churches.

Sometimes people need churches where they are vacationing. I have helped people find those churches when they are going on a vacation.

I've also helped people find churches for loved ones that live in different parts of the world. So please, if you need help, send me an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com

and I will try my best from the list of churches that I have to help locate a church near where you need one.

So send that to chrisarnsen at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question for Lou Vega.

We are going to be discussing any moment now, Tyranny, Its Cause and Cure. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com

chrisarnsen at gmail .com And Lou, I know that you have reached the point where you have embraced the

Reformed faith. And I want you to go just briefly into how you believe you received a call from God to enter into the ministry.

And then we will move on to our subject on Tyranny. I just want to read an email that we got from a listener who happens to be a new friend of mine.

He is a long time listener. Sterling Vanderwerker. And I just met

Sterling for the very first time face to face when I was coming back from Tennessee where I went to a conference last week.

And Sterling and his lovely wife Bronnie Vanderwerker invited me to spend a couple of nights in their home.

And Sterling is also going to be an advertiser soon on Iron Sherpins Iron Radio. He is the owner of Royal Diadem Jewelers in Greensboro, North Carolina.

But Sterling just has a note of encouragement for you. He says, So glad to hear a pastor acknowledge the importance of God's people as an important aspect of corporate worship and of the evangelization experience of visitors.

The gospel lived out is not only praise to our Lord, but important to those who are lost.

Thank him for me. And that's from Sterling Vanderwerker. I just thought I'd pass that on to you since it's a nice word of encouragement.

Thank you very much, Brother Sterling. I appreciate those words. Okay, if you could now pick up where you really knew that God had a call upon your life to enter into the ministry.

Well, you know, spending all those hours in the Bible and in commentary and in prayer not because anyone told me to do that, but that's really where all my interest and all my comfort was.

It was all there in that time when I was doing that. The Lord was very, very close.

And, of course, I knew that there was a ministry because of my friendship with Pastor McCracken and others,

Pastor Lutz. But I wasn't quite sure what to make of my calling with it.

I felt like there was a tug early on. I was probably not even three years converted when

I felt a tug to do ministry. And yet I was an engineer with IBM, and I had a good career.

And it seemed like almost everywhere I turned and inquired of seminary possibilities, those doors closed.

I tried several seminaries. There was a Christian denomination seminary in Cincinnati at the time, and I looked that direction.

I ended up later moving to Wilmore, Kentucky, and considered Asbury Theological Seminary. Of course, that's

Methodist, but still, there's some good teaching there. I knew a number of the faculty there.

They were friends. We ended up moving to Wilmore and lived there a number of 18 years or so. My wife was adjunct faculty in music there at Asbury College.

And we had many friends in town that were professors and whatnot. And yet that door did not open.

I gave myself to learning, and I realized that in my studies I had something that I could help people with.

And I was especially drawn to Latinos, because the Latinos don't have the opportunities here always.

And the ones who have the least opportunities are those Latinos that are in prison. And one of our friends in the church,

Shirley Dougherty, was a volunteer prison chaplain, prison chaplain for the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky.

And she invited me to meet the head chaplain, Warren Shave. And I didn't know what was happening, but evidently

Reverend Shave was looking for another assistant, and I had no idea that a person such as myself with really no other qualifications could come in and be a volunteer and help out.

But he trusted me so much, and he liked me. He was very, very encouraging.

He was very fatherly. But he got me to a regular pass, and I was working under the chaplain in a federal prison where there were 2 ,000 inmates.

And all those federal prisons sometimes are all male, sometimes they're all female, and then they have mixed male -female.

So I saw in those 14 years a great mix of population. But I always tried to go to the people that were hurting the most.

My first stop was usually the hospital ward, and then I would have a Bible class, and I would exhort and read and answer questions.

And sometimes those services of the Bible studies and my exhortation... I can't call it preaching. My mentor,

Dr. Piper, says, no, no, no, you have to be a minister to preach. You're exhorting. So anyway, I felt like preaching, because I was quite adamant of what

I was saying. And I was really applying the word of God with great intensity, but I would preach for an hour and a half, which developed a certain bad habit in me now when

I'm in public. I preach long. Oh, well. Anyway, so in those days, though, those people were hungry, and they did not want me to stop on Tuesday nights.

I was in the federal prison, and every time the warden came back or the chaplain said, time's up, time to go, there was a moan.

There was a moan, because those people wanted the Scriptures. They wanted the word of God. They were hungry. They were in prison.

They knew their bondage of sin. I didn't have to explain that to them. They had tasted that, and now they were beginning to taste the deliverance.

They were beginning to taste the liberty. They were beginning to taste Christ. And I could see the lights coming on in their eyes, week upon week, and that's why

I kept going back. I kept going back. Now, I was doing that, and then

I quickly realized, however, that if I was to really do an abiding work, I really needed the institution that Christ appointed for that, and that is the

Church. And that's where my Thornwellian excellence comes in. If you really want to talk about the high ecclesiology of Presbyterianism, I don't know any better than Thornwell, at least on the

American soil. Well, anyway, I said, you know, really, the Church is worth that, and I need to prepare to work in the

Church, because that's the bride that we adorn, and that's the bride that we prepare for Christ, and that's the greatest witness.

In fact, if you think about it, that's exactly where I was converted. I came to my senses as a witness of the

Church. So I directed my studies, and I began to align my studies towards seminary.

I began getting private lessons in Greek and Hebrew, and reading very good systematics.

I read Oliver Boswell, who was one of the

PCA's founding father systematicians, but then I, later on,

I would read Puritan, the three volumes when that was published later in the 90s.

But I really was drawn to systematics, because I, well, it parsed out the truth, the dogma, the teaching in such a very nice way.

And I was drawn to that. And I was drawn to good preaching. I think at that point in my life

I had read everything in print by Martin Lloyd Jones. And then when I married my wife, she inherited a tape library of some hundred cassettes from her time, she spent some time in Caracas, Venezuela, and about a hundred audio cassettes of the preaching of Lloyd Jones came by as a present from Tony Howard, who was a parishioner and a disciple of Martin Lloyd Jones in London.

So anyway, those were my great fascinations. And so I knew that I was,

I wanted seminary, but it didn't seem like I could get there. Well then, IBM and Lexmark, they strapped me to retirement, you see.

And then I was looking at myself and my wife, and what are we going to do? What do you want to do?

What I want to do, and I don't know if we can afford it, but I just want to go to seminary. And she says, well, let's just do it.

So I went to Greenville for a seminary, which I think honestly is just the best.

By the way, do you know one of my pastors, John Miller at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania?

I love John Miller. Yes, yes, yes. What a delightful man. What a good brother.

Such a great guy. Of course, I know Dr. Piper, who I've interviewed, Joey Piper, and I've interviewed, let's see, of course

I mentioned Fort Bell Hill from the seminary. And I know

Jeff Downs. Yeah, those are all the mighty men. Those are all, you know, the mighty men of David there.

I can't remember if Deckard Stevens was a Christian there, but I know he was from that area. Do you know

Deckard Stevens? Yes, I certainly do. And his daughter and marriage to Dr.

Ryan McGraw and all that. Oh, and Ryan McGraw I've interviewed, yes. I mean, you're hitting all, that's my circle of friends.

That's where I run. Those are all my friends. Great. Well, now tell us something about setting the stage before we go into the biblical data about tyranny.

Set the stage a little bit about Castro's Cuba. What you can remember about it as a child or at least what your parents told you and about the whole experience of fleeing there, as much as you can remember, or what was related to you by your parents and your finding a new home in America.

Give us an idea of why this subject of tyranny is so etched in your heart and mind.

Well, yeah. I have to be careful because this could take several radio interviews.

Oh, that's fine. I already know that I want to do Part 2 at least and possibly Part 2 and 3 on the subject with you.

The thing is that the listeners will be disappointed if I don't get back to the biblical exegesis.

Let me just make a quick sketch. A very, very quick sketch. And we can explore this in other ways because being raised as a

Cuban -American stateside, it is inevitable that you get all these stories which you remember from your parents and their friends and other relatives and all that about what exactly happened in Cuba.

But let me just say this. On December 31, 1958, my father and mother were visiting my uncle, my mother's brother,

Omero, for anticipating the New Year in Havana in 1958.

And my uncle had always been a successful man. He was an engineer.

And he could afford it. So he bought a very fine bottle of oh,

I forget what he was drinking. Anyway, it's a French thing.

I'm not a connoisseur on that. But anyway, I know that if you were to price it today, the bottle runs for $1 ,218.

Wow, it was like a cognac, a rare cognac? It was a cognac. It was cognac Napoleon. In fact, that's what it was,

Napoleon cognac. And it was a good reserve of that. But anyway, they're enjoying that.

And my mother was never a drinker. She was a pharmacist. She avoided OH molecules, I guess.

But anyway, she and my father and my uncle enjoyed that.

And they were resting. And they went to bed after that. And when they woke up in the morning,

Cuba was gone. That was it. Cuba was a Republican government, a free state.

But on January 1, 1959, Castro and his troops rolled in and declared a new government.

And he was the head of the armed forces there as a general. And he had the machine power.

He had the gunpowder. And he had the popular backing, which is a long story in how that developed.

But he had a popular backing. And so Batista had to flee for his life and leave it all.

And we had a new regime. That regime, well, just by looking at the pictures, you know that these guys are not about anything nearly related to Western civilization as we knew it.

These guys looked like hard... They were soldiers. And they were radicals.

And they knew what they believed. And they believed it fervently. Castro's ideology, believe it or not,

I think was formed in the Jesuit schools where he was brought up.

The Jesuit worldview is very neat and systematized and comprehensive.

And it really does. They tried to be as puritanical as the Puritans were in their Christian worldview.

And their view, of course, is not that necessarily the gospel is the pivot point, but that the

Vatican is the pivot point, politically and ecclesiastically. So he developed that edge for puritanical governance of all things from the

Catholic faith, which itself, of course, in the medieval popes was one of the most terrifying tyrannies that has ever, ever existed, both in the political and in the spiritual realm.

It was a complete tyranny. And if you read historians like Merle Dauvigny, you find that in the

Lord's Providence, the small township of Geneva had been prepared for a thousand years before ever

Pharaoh or Calvin showed up on the scene. They had been prepared as a people for a message of hope, of true liberty, of excellence in government from tyranny.

And the gospel does that. It does that for spiritually, but then that salt and light eventually spills over into all things.

Well, anyway, Castro came because of the excesses. Although we had a republican form of government, the people were not self -governed.

And you know that Tocqueville said that America is good. It's a democracy and it works, and it will continue to work as long as the people are good.

But now, of course, what he's saying is, if the goodness fails, the democracy fails and we have other things come in.

Well, in Cuba, we've always had a syncretistic religion. I can't blame it all on the

Roman Catholic faith. I mean, the Roman Catholic faith was paramount. There was Presbyterianism, as I alluded to, and Catalanism in other places on the island, but it was because the

Roman Catholic Church allowed altogether too much of blending of the

Afro -Cuban idolatries. Like Santeria? Santeria, yeah,

Santeria. Now, a lot of people here, when we would watch the

Lucy and Desi Arnaz show, remember that? How could I forget?

Remember that? You know, remember? Ricky on the Congos, remember that? Oh, of course, at the

Tropicana, right? At the Tropicana, and he's singing what song? He's singing Babalu. That's right,

Babalu! Babalu would be like you singing Bale. Wow. Yeah, Babalu is an

African deity. Wow. It's pandemic. But what that leads to, well, idolatry always leads to looseness.

And I've already spoken to my mother's chagrin at all her friends and just how unchaste everybody was.

Because she was at least, you know, she knew that Christianity was something else in our pious

Catholic home. Well, anyway. And that gets into my topic here, what happened in Cuba.

It doesn't matter if you have a brilliant Constitution. It doesn't matter if you have handsome and eloquent senators or the idealism of a liberator in the form of José Martí, which was a tremendous poet and a philosopher.

I mean, you guys, you Americans need to know more about Cuban history. I mean, the history of Florida should never be written apart from the history of Cuba.

The two were twins. They were Siamese twins, Florida and Cuba. And in fact, a lot of people, especially millennials, would have no idea that at one time

Cuba was the playground of the rich and famous for those in the United States who would vacation there, and even a playground provided by the mafia.

No, then that is actually correct. That is correct. It was a place of tremendous beauty.

I'll say this. When the gold was extracted from the mountains in Central America, it was ingoted and then rushed on ships to Spain.

That was a very bad idea because the French had pirates and the English had pirates and they would sink those

Spanish galleons with gold. And so Spain began to hoard its gold in Cuban treasuries.

And we had three good ports. Havana was the primary port.

And in those ports the ships would come and we'd have the ingots, but in those we developed storehouses, treasuries of gold.

And so we had the majority of the I don't know, I can't say the numbers, I haven't seen the ledgers, but much, much, much of the gold that was available from the

New World, which was unheard of fortunes of gold, were actually resident in Cuba.

Never made it across to Spain. And in the time of the Revolution, there was no time to get that out. So when we broke away from Spain in 1898, there was an amazing amount of money as gold ingoted gold in our treasuries.

And of course, a country that is now that has a compromised

Christian religion mixing with further compromise with syncretism, extremely central because of the beauty of the island and the provision, now mixed with lots and lots of money.

Lots and lots of money. I once picked up a used copy of a 1917 travel booklet to Havana 1917.

And the photographs that I saw, the black and white photos that I saw in that little booklet would challenge any pictures of Beverly Hills even today.

Havana was wealthy beyond almost anything we could conceive. And that is a bad, bad, bad, bad mixture.

Because when the people at the top have a lot and they are not charitable, they're not Christian, they don't show compassion.

Well, it was easy for Castro to build up a sentiment with the underprivileged. He promised them the world.

In fact, now we have to go to our final break. I'll make it as brief as possible. And of course, don't be too anxious because we will definitely as long as our guest is willing, and God is willing, we're going to have part two to continue the discussion in more depth biblically.

But we're going to be coming back with more of Lou Vega right after these messages. So if you have a question to ask, send it in quickly to chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

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That's this Friday, July 5th, 4 to 6 p .m. Eastern Time on Iron Trepans Iron Radio. Well, we're now back to the final segment with our guest today,

Lou Vega. We are going to be continuing this, no doubt, on another program on the theme,

Tyranny, Its Cause and Cure. And before the break, you were just reaching the point of explaining why

Cuba became a ripe place for a communist revolution. Yes.

Now, a lot of the indicators may not be apparent, because, you know, one of the good things about the

Cuban public was that it had an exceedingly high readership. About 99 percent of the people were schooled, and they read.

There were a lot of very amazing things in Cuba that made it a very attractive place for families and for those who were fortunate enough to complete their education.

All the colleges were open for enrollment. You can matriculate. They didn't care who you were, just have a seat.

But you had to stay in the class and pass the tests, and the tests were fair.

But there was no incentive to pass everybody, because the state couldn't afford to school everybody.

So it guaranteed that the most excellent could get through. Anyway, a lot of good things in Cuba.

You mustn't think that I'm totally negative on the place. I mean, common grace in that respect, sustaining life and checking evil is always upheld by the

Lord, and there's always that in any state. However, in Cuba, things got rotten very, very quickly for any number of reasons.

You mentioned the mafia, but there was a lot of drug and cocaine traffic through Havana.

A lot of corruption. Prostitution was the order of the day. And of course, the

Havana dancers in the nightclubs were famous, the mulattas, they were very beautiful women.

They were known for their green eyes. All these things made for a tremendous amount of sensuality.

How do I know this is true? Well, the history books report some of this, but you know, you can tell a lot by the sons and daughters of those who made it over, even in the exile.

These were not atheist Marxists. These were people that came over with an ambition for liberty, and yet a lot of them did not find, well, they came to America, they tasted economic and political liberties.

A lot of them will remain in the shackles of superstition and in the bondage of sin because their minds were not renewed, their hearts were not renewed, there was no regeneration, there was no spirit of Christ and the new man, the gospel.

The gospel is not altogether clear in the Roman Catholic Church.

I mean, it's there, but as I said before, the Catholic Church gives it to you with the left hand and then it takes back something, again, on the right.

And that confusion is very, very bad. Now, there's one sin,

I think, that would lead immediately to God's anger and just wrath, and that is idolatry.

If you read the history of Israel, you'll see that the Lord will put up with much, but idolatry, especially as it comes into extreme selfishness, the neglect of the poor, and that aspect,

Castro capitalized on, Castro really did capitalize that. People could see the wealthy, especially the visiting wealthy from America, and I think they wanted a taste of this.

But by that time, Cuba was not living in its glory days, Cuba was living in its glamour days, and it's a difference, there's a difference, there's a lot of tinsel and a lot of sparkle, but no more golden ingots.

And so that kind of a thing is ripe for tyranny.

I want to get into this whole thing, though, it just is a taste, Chris, because people need to understand, the

Cuban exile community, I don't think, understands. And if they're listening in, I'd be privileged to tell them this, that God is absolute sovereign.

There's only one absolute sovereign, okay? And when you don't worship the absolute sovereign as he is in all of his perfections, then you are worshiping something less, an idol, perhaps something even you made up in your own mind.

And so what God does is he gives up idolaters to their own sin, and sin leads to anarchy and tyranny.

But what we have to understand is, even that judgment of God is not necessarily absolute, because tyranny as presented to an idolater is a mirror and an x -ray of his heart.

The sinner can see the oppression of a man or some creature lording it over him, and the grind of it, and the shame of it, and the injustice of it.

He feels it to his very heart, and his soul despises it.

But the problem is, if he's rejected God, well, God has given him something to show him what other leader now governs him.

God, in a strange mixture of mercy and justice, gives tyranny to people, nation groups, people groups, over to tyranny, that they might cry out to him, as in the book of Judges, in the period of the

Judges, that people worshiped false gods. They fell into all kinds of debased behavior.

And then they weakened, because Satan does, he weakens the nations. And they fell prey to their neighboring

Canaanite rulers. And they were oppressive. And they stole their liberties, and they whittled away at their dignity, until they woke up and they remembered

God, and they cried out to God, and God would raise up a deliverer. And then they were saved, and then they lived, and they were again prosperous.

Well, this cyclical pattern is found in large, large scale cycles in the kingdoms, in the major kingdoms of the world.

But that would be a subject for another time, if you so choose. Oh yeah, I definitely want to have you back. In fact,

I have, when we go off the air, I'm going to read some dates to you, because I definitely want to have you back on the air soon on this issue.

In fact, we have a listener who has a question to ask. We have

CJ in Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, many liberals laugh and scoff and mock at the notion that this nation, the

United States of America, will ever become succumbed to a tyrannical rule.

And that is one of the reasons that they are trying to rob us of our rights to bear arms.

Do you think that the threat of a tyranny rising up in America is a lot more real than our liberal friends imagine?

Well, of course. And if tyranny would come, it would come in through the very left extremists that we read about in the papers.

They can't see it because it's themselves, it's their nose, it's their nose.

Tyranny will probably come in by ignoring the teachings of the fathers, the founding fathers of America, the wisdom of the ages, the voice of the church, every conceivable theory supporting good economic practice and frugality and charity and society, with a complete devaluation of the fundamentals of all human life, being work, marriage, and Sabbath.

See, you take those things away, and you want to introduce a new manufactured utopia.

It's got to be something brand new, because we're, after all, Darwinian, we're evolutionists, and it's got to be something new, because everything that's old has been already tried and is not brought about a utopia, and a utopia must be, because even the most radical liberal has eternity in his heart, he has a vestige of some kind of hope of glory, even though he's misdirected in what he's seeking.

And so he'll press on in his madness, just like Fidel Castro did, in some Marxist utopian dream.

And it doesn't matter how many people he will kill to establish it, the end justifies the means.

So yeah, I mean, my friend there, CJ, is, yeah, we could, sure. I mean, in fact, we see things like this happening all the time that are rising up in our midst right now.

It's not even a future threat. There are things happening all around us, people losing their livelihoods because they may oppose homosexuality, because they believe in a biblical concept of morality and sin.

And there's all kinds of things, but... Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Chris, you know, Castro is true to his

Marxist principles, you know, everything old must go. And we're talking about renaming, they invent new names for all peoples.

The Cubans that are coming out of Cuba now, they have such unusual names, I've never heard of such things.

They're not classical names, they're not biblical names, for sure. Are they Spanish names? No, no, they're bits and various content of this, that, the other thing thrown together,

I don't know where they got it, but anyway, they're strange names. But everything must go, but especially the very foundations, because the image of God, well, they're fighting that image, they're fighting, they're fighting to fight against the

Lord and His anointed in Psalm 2, and they want to break their fetters and loosen their bonds.

But, you know, God establishes king upon Zion, and God rules. God is absolute autodespotos, and see, that's the irony of it.

Chris's tyrants are mimicking the storyline of whom God is, but they're perverting it.

Right. There's only one story, there's only one story, it's God's story. Either you can agree with it, or you can pervert it.

Right, and we're going to pick up right where you left off there, and I will, if you could stay in the line so I can get a date reserved for you for part two of this discussion.

I just want to make sure our listeners know that Covenant Church in Houston, Texas has a website, it's covenantpca .org,

covenantpca .org. I also want to let you know that if you are interested in discovering more about the life and teachings of J.

H. Thornwell, who happens to be a hero of our guest today, James H.

Thornwell, you can get his book, Theological Discourses, from the heart of J.

H. Thornwell. Theology as a Life is the title of the book, and you can find that at solid -ground -books .com.

solid -ground -books .com, our sponsors, Solid Ground Christian Books.

Thank you so much, Pastor. I look forward to having you back on the program. If you could please stay so we can get you back on the air,

Pastor Lou, and I'll be right with you after we close. I want to thank everybody who listened today, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater