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Sunday school from June 2nd, 2024
Let's pray. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we ask you, Holy Spirit, to help us to understand what is revealed there so that we may properly believe, confess, and do all according to your holy word.
We ask in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, we had a question that somebody had regarding the gospel text from last Sunday. Now, a little bit of a note here. Is there an expiration date on questions?
No.
Okay?
And we are not afraid of questions here at Kongsvinger Lutheran Church. I would note that one of the things that I hear very common from people who've come to us from other churches, especially like Charismatic and Pentecostal churches and things like that, is that you are not allowed to ask questions at places like that because you'll sit there and you'll ask a question like, hey, how come what you said in the sermon isn't what the Bible says here?
It says this. And so what do they do? They, touch not God's anointed. You need to take your seat and you need to just submit to your pastor. It's like, yeah. So we're not afraid of questions here, but let me remind you of what the gospel text was from last week, and we'll see if I can kind of paraphrase the question.
And what's fun is, is that the answer to the question is actually found in an article that was given by one of our students in our Greek class, which is rather fascinating. So we're in the gospel of John chapter three, and let's take a look here.
John chapter three. And Jesus talks about how no one has ascended into heaven, right? And so here's the issue, is that if you read it according to the way the ESV is translated, it's not that it's a bad translation.
It's just that how to properly understand it then becomes a little bit more of a reach. And let me explain. So he says in verse 13, no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the son of man.
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted.
Up.
We sit there and go, well, didn't Elijah ascend into heaven? Has Jesus forgotten that? And so how are we to understand Elijah's ascension versus the ascension here that Christ is talking.
About?
Well, when you dig into the Greek on this, it's not as easy as you might think. And so the author of the Greek grammar that I use to teach Greek with, his name is Bill Mounts, and his grammar is called the basics of biblical Greek.
And in John 3 .13, he notes that there is an alternative way to translate two particular Greek words that come side by side here, and they are a, may.
All right?
Now, if you were to just translate it like woodenly, if not, okay, which doesn't make a lot of sense if I were to kind of read it out to you. So coming back here, so no one has ascended into heaven, if not the one who descended from heaven, the son of man.
So you've got a problem here. So the if not doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, so the ESV translates it as except. But there's another way to translate those two words together when they show up, and the word is but.
And so watch what he does here and see if this, I think this kind of has like the ring of truth to it, because you'll note sometimes when you pull things over in English, it just doesn't quite work. So here's what it says.
Jesus has just chastised Nicodemus for not understanding, and then he adds in verse 13, no one has ascended into heaven except, so he's quoting with the ESV here, who has descended from heaven, the son of man.
This is the normal translation of a, may. The source of Jesus' heavenly knowledge is the fact that he descended from heaven, right? But notice the problem with the timing. No one has ascended, past tense, so that's past tense, except, and there we go again, a, may, the incarnate Jesus who has descended.
But how can Jesus at the beginning of his ministry say that he has, past tense, ascended? Did John make a mistake? And of course, then you'll note the way we're reading it in the ESV, you're thinking, well, Elijah, didn't he go up to heaven in a chariot of fire?
I mean, didn't he ascend? Isn't the whole point of Elijah's going up in a chariot of fire a type and shadow of Christ's ascension? Well, it gets a little more interesting. So the NLT, that's the New Living Translation, solution to translate this is, translate it this way, no one has ever gone to heaven and returned, but the son of man has come down.
From heaven.
That is so much clearer. And so the idea here is that I think the NLT is onto something and Mounce has kind of put his finger on it. And that is that what Christ is talking about is that the authority that he has to say the things that he's saying is that he is the one who has descended from heaven and he's able to tell us the heavenly things.
So again, listen to the translation, but, okay, so no one has ever gone to heaven and returned, but the son of man has come down from heaven is the better way of putting it. And I would note and returned there is not stated explicitly in the text, but implied.
And if you take the, if you take a may and you translate it as, but, but the son of man has come down from heaven, but is the translation of the idiom, a may, which the ESV and most scholars translate as except the difference is significant.
According to the New Living Translation, Jesus is saying that no one has ever ascended to heaven and thus cannot speak with the divine authority he, the, with the divine authority he possesses. Jesus, on the other hand, descended from heaven.
The hint is that his pre-existence is proof of his divine authority to speak divine things. The question is, can the Greek idiom bear this meaning? While the standard meaning of the idiom is except, be dag, do list, why did he use the singular?
Be dag, the, the, is it, wouldn't it be does, you know, yeah, maybe he's, he's counting all the be daggians individually here, you know, Bauer and Daniker, Art and Gingrich.
Okay.
They, they list one usage where it means but, and bears the same meaning. Okay. That's first Corinthians chapter seven, verse 17. This usage also surfaces in Matthew 12, four and Galatians one. So Carson, as DA Carson goes on to some length to explain this usage, the gospel according to John in the pillar New Testament commentary series, page 200, saying that the idiom can introduce an exception to the general rule just stated, and yet the exception does not break the general rule.
So the solution is found with a rather rare use of a may, no one has ever gone to heaven and the idea is, and then brought back that heavenly knowledge. However, the preexistent Jesus comes down from heaven with heavenly knowledge.
And so, so what do we learn? Idioms can be difficult.
They can.
And so the question that you were, that you brought up was legitimately a result of a challenging idiom and how to pull it over into English. And and so being able to refer back to the Greek and then note that this, this, I think there's something to this here because you can, you can clearly see in the context, that's what Jesus is really getting at.
He's the one who's descended from heaven and he's able to speak of these things. And so that that's the authority that he's able to talk about.
So.
All right.
So does that answer your question, sir?
Good question, by the way. And again, a reminder, questions are welcome at Kongsvinger. This is how disciples learn by asking questions.
We are in the book of Ezekiel. We are in 28. And for the sake of kind of a little bit of redundancy, keeping our context, I'm going to reread this portion where last week we noted that Ezekiel is giving through the, through the Holy Spirit, a prophecy, a lament over the king of Tyre.
And in the middle of it, it sounds like he's talking about somebody else, you know, Satan,.
Right? Could it be Satan?
Yes, it's Satan here we're talking about. And that's kind of a fascinating thing. And so we spent a little bit of last week talking about what little information we have regarding Satan's backstory. We don't have a lot, but, and if you remember, I said last week that the truly original sin is the narcissistic pride of Satan that's recorded for us in Isaiah 14.
And I, here in Ezekiel 28, we can kind of see also that same theme in here. And so while God is legitimately giving a lament over the king of Tyre, he sees in him satanic qualities that then God uses to give us just a little bit more of Satan's backstory, which basically tells you that Satan is a sick puppy.
It's true.
You know, if he were in your home, he'd be barfing all over the floor and the carpet and stuff like that. He's a sick puppy. You know, he's that dog that returns to his own vomit, if you would. So here's what the text says, again, verse 11, chapter 28 of Ezekiel,.
Moreover, the word of Yahweh came to me, son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre. And you say to him, thus says the Lord, Yahweh, you were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden. How old is that king of Tyre again?
Right?
You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering. Sardius, topaz, diamond, barrel, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, carbuncle, and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings.
On the day that you were created, they were prepared. You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you. You were on the holy mountain of God in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. You were blameless in your ways.
From the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you. In the abundance of your trades, you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned. So I cast you out as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and I destroyed you, oh guardian cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.
And when you hear a story like this, and again, I noted the stones of fire. What are those? Where are those? You get the feeling there's so much more to God's creation than we even are aware of, right?
So you'll note this is speaking of a history and a geography of things that we're not even familiar with, right? Your heart was proud because of your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
You know, my heart used to be proud about how handsome I was, and then God did this to me, and now I have nothing to be proud of anymore. So problem solved.
Yes?
Is it wrong for you to think of Solomon? Solomon had a similar fall, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what to make of Solomon. You got to be careful with that one. Yeah, in a lot of ways, Solomon in his early part of his reign truly is a type and shadow of Christ.
Much of what he does is a type and shadow of Christ. But when you get to the point where he's married so many foreign women, and they're all idolaters, and he's now compromising and setting up little temples to their false gods and stuff like that, he ceases to be a type and shadow of Christ.
Yeah, but I don't think he ever became high on his own on that. It's more like he probably walked away from it, at least in practice. So talking about Satan, your heart was proud because of your beauty.
You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground. I exposed you before kings to feast their eyes on you. By the multitude of your iniquities in the unrighteousness of your trade, you profaned your sanctuary.
So I brought fire out from your midst, and it consumed you. And I turned you to ashes on the earth in the sight of all who saw you. All who know you among the peoples are appalled at you. You have come to a dreadful end.
You shall be no more. You get the feeling that pride is a big problem.
Right. Okay.
Now, prophecy against Sidon. And here's where we're going to do a little excursus.
So we live in a day where the church now is being assaulted by zealots. Now you're saying, what on earth is a zealot?
Let me explain what a zealot is.
In Christ's day, the zealots were the ones who were agitating in both rhetoric and in actions to bring about the reestablishment of the theocracy of Israel on planet earth.
And I recently read a book that was talking about, you know, these kind of these themes. And the author, who was a Lutheran scholar in Paris after World War II, he made a claim that I had not seen, and I have to see if I can validate it.
He made a claim that it is potential that Judas himself was a zealot. You know, so he's Judas what? Iscariot.
Right.
But here's the interesting. Scarari is the Latin word for zealot. And so he thinks that Judas Iscariot, that that might actually be referencing the fact that he was, that he himself was a zealot. Interesting kind of thing.
But there was a zealot among Jesus's disciples for sure, a fellow by the name of Simon. I like to think of him as Simon the zealot. And the day that we live in right now, okay, there's a whole group of people.
And unfortunately, they're within the ranks of confessional Lutheranism, at least visibly within confessional Lutheranism. And they are aping for, rhetorically calling for, what they call Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism. And Christian nationalism is this really, really, really, really, really vague term. And some people think that Christian nationalism is just this. Well, Christian nationalism is just the desire for Christians to vote their conscience and put Christian and godly leaders into office in Washington, D .C.
To which I say, Christians have been doing that since long before you Gen Z folks were.
Born, okay.
This is what I would call skibbity Ohio on their parts.
So, right.
Well, this is true.
You'll note that in the United States of America, godly men in office in the United States is becoming rare, hard to find. And as a result of this, we have to have a conversation here along these lines.
And I think Ezekiel's a good place to have it. Is there a theocracy in existence when Ezekiel is written?
Yes.
Where?
Who's the king of the Jews in Ezekiel? What's happened to the Davidic king? He's gone. There is no king. They've lost self-rule, right? Keep this in mind. So, the church is where then? We're going to use the word church in reference to believers regardless of Old Testament and New Testament.
We'll call them the church. Where's the church right now in Ezekiel? They're in Babylon, which means they're where? Exile.
They are in exile. This is a good place to talk about this because you note that god here in this portion of is offering up judgment and prophetic words of lamentation and judgment against the different nations of the earth, right?
But here's the question I have for you. Who set up Tyre as a government? Who set up Sidon as a government? Who set up Babylon as a government? Who set up the Greeks? The Parthenians, the Medes, the Persians.
Who set them up?
God.
So, here's the thing. When we look at the church in exile here, there is no theocracy. And I would note, and I've said it before, long before we were talking about this topic, and that is that when you look at Daniel, when you look at Ezekiel, when you look at the church in exile, this is a type and shadow of the church today, okay?
If I were to take a globe, and yes, the earth is a globe. Flat earthers be damned, okay? These are conspiracy theorists who are deluded, all right? Yes, the earth is a globe. If I were to take a globe, and I were to spin the globe, and I were to put my finger down anywhere on the globe, would I touch the Christian nation?
Why?
Oh, my favorite catechumen, okay? The answer that James gave is because Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world, okay? So, it's important when you read the scriptures, it's important that you get a few things right, and you recognize where certain errors actually come from, okay?
So, Christ, let's just do a little bit of work here, kind of a zealotry type of thing. What was the predominant belief of the Jews of Jesus' time regarding the Messiah? What was the predominant belief that when the Messiah showed up, he was going to do what?
Yeah, reestablish, let's say it's a little stronger than that. Not just reestablish the monarchy, but reestablish the theocracy, right? With the Davidic king on the throne. The Romans, by the way, they were sick and tired of zealots.
The zealots of Jesus' day, they were known for slitting the throats of Roman soldiers who were on guard, you know, in the streets of Jerusalem. That's what they were known for. They were a murderous rabble.
And you'll note that in the book of Acts, even some of the zealots are mentioned because they were always leading men into battle, you know, kind of insurrectionist types. And always their leader was like somebody who was making a false claim to the Davidic throne.
And they were trying to rally Israel to reestablish the theocracy against the evil Roman empire. So, when Jesus is tested regarding paying taxes, okay? Do we pay taxes to Caesar or not? This is a catch -22 question.
And the reason why it's a... I have to grab my words back again. The reason why it's a catch -22 is because to the zealots, if you say you pay your taxes to Caesar, then you are not a true Israelite. You've sold out.
You're into boomer theology. You're a crypto-Roman boomer.
But if you say you don't pay your taxes, then you're truly an insurrectionist. And Rome would see you as that. And they'd see you as a zealot. And it'd be really easy to off you, right? So, what does Jesus say?
Hand me a denarius. Holds up the coin. Whose inscription is on this?
Caesar.
Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. And to God what is God's.
What a completely unsatisfactory answer for the zealots. There's something to this. So, let me go back to the question here. So, Jesus is testing his disciples. He's taken them out to Caesarea Philippi, which is pagan territory, to a place called the Gates of Pan, which is like a demonic worship place in the pagan pantheon.
And so, Jesus asked them in Caesarea Philippi, who do people say that the Son of Man is? No, Jesus, how's he referring to himself? Son of Man. Have you noticed how tepid Jesus is to embrace the title of Christos for himself?
Of being called the Messiah? It's fascinating. He rarely does it. Because if Jesus were just flippantly running around saying, I am the Messiah, all the zealots would say, well, we're going to make you king.
Isn't that what they wanted to do when Jesus, you know, fed the 5 ,000? They were going to make him king by force. So, who do people say that the Son of Man is? They said, well, some say John the Baptist, other Elijah, and others, Jeremiah, are one of the prophets.
He said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ. You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
And I tell you, you are Peter on this rock. I will build my church in the gates of hell, shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.
Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. The keys of the what? Kingdom of heaven. So then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the what? The Christ, the Messiah. You tell nobody this.
So from that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and then be killed and on the third day be raised.
Is this part of the expectation of the eschatology of the Jews and of the zealots? No, what good is a crucified Messiah? How are we going to set up the theocracy with a corpse, okay? So Peter took him aside and he began to rebuke him, saying, far be it from you, Lord, this shall never happen to you.
What's going on here? Again, look at these words.
Peter rebuked. Who?
Try this with your boss at work, okay? I'm not talking about you, right? You rebuke your boss and tell me how things are going to go, right? So who is Peter rebuking?
Christ.
Why is he rebuking him? He doesn't understand Christ's purpose. Did Christ come to set up a theocracy? Okay, so listen to what Christ says. Jesus turned to Peter and said, get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me.
You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. Where in the scripture is the Christian church commanded to set up a Christian theocracy? Yeah, on earth as it is in heaven.
What's really funny is that I've been seeing some of these Christian nationalists use that text to justify their things. On earth as it is in heaven. You know, what's funny is that I've heard that text twisted by all kinds of heretics.
Let's start with the woke left, shall we? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Ah, says the woke left, there is no poverty in heaven. There's no poverty. There's no racism in heaven.
This is true, by the way. There is none of that in heaven. Therefore, we need to be about the business of eliminating poverty and racism. Now, a little bit of a note here. Is poverty bad? Is racism bad?
Is that the mission of the church to eradicate either of those two things? That's God's mission, right? So I would know. Those are bad things. Racism, it's absolutely demonic. Anybody who would think that somehow they are racially superior to somebody else.
And I would note something here. A little bit of a side note. That among the Christian nationalists, there's a whole group of them that are embracing fascism and Nazism, and that is not rhetoric on my part.
That's a fact, okay? And their picture of a Christian nation, they want to turn the United States into a Christian nation. They want the United States to have a Christian monarch, and when they come into power, they're going to, and they're open about this.
They're going to re-enslave every African American, and they're going to put back into place racial segregation. Does that sound anything like Christ's kingdom to you?
Nope.
Yes, he did. Yeah, right. You're getting ahead of me here. I like that, okay? Let's keep on this taxa. So that being the case, I would note that this idea of a Christian theocracy is already dubious on multiple grounds, especially since their vision is this.
They claim that white is a race. I want to ask you a question. Where on planet Earth can I put my finger down and find the nation of white?
Antarctica.
Yes. Send them all there. They can have it, okay? You can't, because here's the thing. Neither Scripture nor the Lutheran confessions define race the way they do. When Scripture talks about ethnicities, ethnicities are, if you were, kind of like supersets of particular families, all right?
If you were to think back to the book of Genesis after the flood and God dispersed everybody, when you get to the table of nations, there's 70 different nations. Nobody's called by those names anymore, by the way, okay?
And you'll note, as people spread out, different minor mutations within the human race occurred, and so you have, in Europe, you have a lot of people who are white. But that's not the only place you have white people.
White isn't a race. And you have also dark-skinned people. My wife is more German than my mother, and my mother was born in Germany. And my wife, you put her in the sun for five minutes, and she becomes a Mediterranean woman, dark, olive-skinned, okay?
And yet, every time we're around her because of her German ethnicities, we're always clacking our heels together, yes, jawohl, when she gives an order, okay? Maybe not that extreme, right? And so, I would note this idea of separating us based upon something as completely shallow as what color, how much melanin we have in our skin is demonic.
It's absolutely demonic. Coming back then, okay, they're in the program of creating a theocracy. And in their way of looking, they believe that Adolf Hitler was trying to establish a Christian nationalism in Germany.
And they look to what he did with longing eyes, thinking that was somehow the heyday of Christendom. He wasn't. He was an evil, maniacal, murderous thug.
He was a national socialist.
Well, yeah, yes, Marilyn. You are asking the right question, okay? How did God, how is he responsible for Hitler, right? So, here's the text that we as Christians have to embrace, okay? Now, before I answer your question, I'm going to ask you just to give me a grade for the United States, okay?
For the United States federal government, A being they are a godly government that enacts godly laws and truly punishes evildoers and rewards those who do good, or F, they do the opposite. What would you give the United States as a grade if you were a school teacher right now?
A D, okay? F minus minus from Josh. Okay, so you don't give the United States an A, okay? When you were growing up, Marilyn, did the United States do better than a D? Yes, they did. So, we have to talk about what happened.
So, we're going to note the current government in its current shambles, and by way, I am no defender of evil in the government. Here's what we have to do as Christians. We have to confess the truth, and that is this, Romans 13.
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. So, we have this conundrum here. You look at our government, and you sit there and go, it's getting a D, or if you ask Josh, it's getting an F minus minus, and doing what it's actually chartered to do, right?
This is true. Now, you have to ask the question, why, and what do you do about it? Why did they do better when you were younger, Marilyn? And by the way, I remember the United States used to do better at this, okay?
They weren't great, but they did better. Now, they're like making no effort, it seems like to me, to like do good, okay? So, we embrace this. Every person be subject to the governing authorities. There is no authority except for from God.
Those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. Four, rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.
Would that 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 God's servant for your good. 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 God's wrath on the evildoer.
And there it is. When we talk about what is the purpose of governments, and here's the thing, every single government on planet earth is temporary. These are all provisional governments. There is no such thing as a permanent government that will last into the time of Christ's return after that in the new earth.
So governments exist for a specific purpose, and Luther in our confessions talk about it as the civil estate. Every government exists for this purpose, to be an avenger of God, to carry out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.
And so by doing, to basically take the chaos that would ensue in anarchy and quench that. That's their purpose. And here's the thing. It doesn't matter if they're communist or capitalist. It doesn't matter if they are a monarchy or a democracy, a republic or some other weird invention of a governmental system.
They're working off of tribal things or whatever. Doesn't matter. They all have the same charter from God, and their charter is to carry out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.
Full stop.
They are not people who are to bring life. They are to bring death to the evildoer so that life can thrive. Now, I was just in Japan.
What a wonderful country that is. It is as pagan as all get out, and there are a few Christians there. Believe me when I tell you that. But one of the things I can tell you is I was able to walk the streets of Tokyo late at night without any fear of being mugged.
I can ride the Tokyo train system to my heart's content, and everybody was kind, everybody was polite, and nobody at all threatened me in any way whatsoever. I felt perfectly safe in Japan. Oddly enough, I felt the same way when I was in the Philippines, a poverty-stricken third world nation for sure.
And parts of the Philippines are kind of tough to look at. But you know what? Everyone was kind. Everybody was polite. At no time did I feel like I was threatened. I never had any of my items stolen from me or anything like that.
Is Japan, as a nation, following God's instruction for that government to punish the evildoer? They are doing an excellent job. Is the United States doing a good job? No, they're not, okay? Now, back to the thing.
Adolf Hitler was duly put into government by God. Did Adolf Hitler do what God commanded him to do?
Who removed Adolf Hitler from office? God did. How did he do it? Through the Allies. How long did the thousand-year Reich last? Twelve years, three months, and how many days?
What was Hitler trying to establish? A theocracy. He was a zealot at heart. And today's alt-right Christian nationalists are zealots. Contrary to the command of Christ to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and contrary to the express words of Christ, my kingdom is not of this earth, they are agitating for the creation of a theocracy on planet earth.
And they use phrases like, Christ is king. Well, of course he is.
Duh.
He's the king who set up the United States of America. So what do we as Christians do when our government goes bad? Well, first of all, we have to introspectively ask the question, why? Why has there been such a noticeable decline in good and a huge increase in evil in our time?
Okay? Okay?
Let's go back in time. Let's go back in time, shall we? Now, I hate it, and I legitimately loathe it, whenever somebody young says, you were born in the 1900s. Come here, lean into this. You know, violence is going to ensue.
I was born in the 20th century. Don't call it the 1900s, right?
Yeah.
So if you go back in time to the 1800s, there was a major shift in the church that occurred middle of the 1800s. It was a tectonic earthquake, theologically, within especially the Protestant churches.
What—see if you guys can figure out—what was the thing that caused that tectonic shift in Christian theology?
What was that?
That's a result of the problem, but not the problem. What is it that really caused the church to begin to start to wobble and go off the rails? Evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin's, his book, The Origin of Species.
Because here's what happened, is that that book changed the conversation. Prior to that book coming out, Christians were very much involved in science. In fact, the earliest scientists that are notable, that you may have learned about when you were in high school and things like this, many of them were Christians, and they specifically set out in their scientific endeavors to do one specific thing, to learn how God did what he did and to understand the creation better.
With The Origin of the Species, the dialogue changes altogether, because with The Origin of the Species, then the narrative comes out that humanity is not the special creation of God. Humanity's ancestors are monkeys that jumped into trees after they were amoebas and crawled up on the earth.
And all of this is a result of millions of years of adaptation through survival of the fittest, right? And here's what happened. You had a whole bunch of scientists who jumped on board with that, and it created a split in people's thinking.
On the one hand, the Christians at the time, the pastors of the time, were not equipped to debunk evolutionary theory. They were not. That wouldn't come until later. And as a result of it, you had Christian pastors who basically decided that they were going to leave the battlefield, and what they ended up doing was taking Christianity and kind of setting it up as its own thing, and its own thing had nothing to do with reality.
They went inward, okay? So the truth of Christianity is what it does inside of your heart. And this is where we get songs like, he lives, he lives, Christ Jesus lives today. You ask me how I know he lives.
He lives within my heart.
Everything goes mystical. And here's what happens then in the seminaries of what used to be the Protestant churches, the mainline churches of Protestantism, which would be your Anglicans, your Lutherans, and also your Presbyterians.
In these three major Protestant denominations, in their seminaries, you have entire faculty in their seminaries dedicating themselves to basically attacking the Word of God and its veracity. If we can't trust Genesis, we can't trust that Isaiah wrote Isaiah, and so we're going to engage in higher criticism and apply it to the Bible to unwind the Word of God and to evacuate it of its authority.
And that was the big fight coming into the turn of the century, from the 1800s to the 20th century, excuse me, into the 1900s, I hate to say that. That was the big fight. And here's the thing. That fight was primarily fought in the early 20th century among the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.
Where was Missouri? Where were the Lutherans at that point? What was the big fight taking place in Missouri at that same time? You all know? That's right. At that time, the Lutherans were out of the fight because the question was whether or not we should switch the liturgy from German to English.
Or Norwegian.
Yeah, Norwegian over here. So culturally, the Lutherans were not in the original fight when it came against what became known as the modernist liberals. And this was such a fight. When you look at Harry Emerson Fosdick and his sermon, shall the fundamentalists win?
Who were the fundamentalists? Well, in their original inception, the fundamentalists were the ones who were holding onto the truth of Scripture. And they were the ones defending the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection of Christ.
The modernist liberals within the church were attacking these biblical truths and saying, listen, miracles are not possible. It's a breaking of God's law. Therefore, Jesus didn't rise from the dead. And Easter is just a metaphor for when the flowers come back after being dead all winter.
And you know what? There were some denominations within Lutheranism that fought valiantly against that. When Missouri finally kicked into gear, they had a bunch of those among their ranks. And 50 years ago, they kicked them out of their seminary in St. Louis.
But here's the thing. If Kungsvinger today, if the pastor of Kungsvinger preached that Jesus wasn't born of the Virgin Mary, that's just a metaphor for something. And Jesus didn't really bodily rise from the dead.
And that we were all descendants of great-grandma and great-grandpa. Ape. You know, we were actually relatives of Harambee.
Would you all be Christians?
So every congregation that buys into this new way of looking at the Scriptures, which is a full-on assault against the veracity of Scripture, they cease to exist as an embassy of Christ. And the gospel is not going forth, and they're not producing Christians.
You knock out enough of those churches, what's the impact that's going to have on society?
I mean, look at the state churches in all of Europe, like all of the Lutheran state churches, like in Germany and in Norway and places like this. Would you sit under those sermons? You wouldn't. Right, exactly.
I would rather be waterboarded.
And what's the reason why? Because they're not preaching biblical truth. So the idea then is this. The reason why we are where we are has nothing to do with racial policy or immigration policy or anything like that.
The reason why we are where we are is because the generations that preceded us did a horrible job of defending the Scriptures and getting the heretics out from among them. As a result of it, the mainline denominations of the early 20th century, they've all fallen.
And I mean that. They have all fallen. The only faithful congregations that exist and faithful church bodies that exist are the ones who've broken off from them or to some degree got rid of them. So here we are now.
We're reduced to a remnant. And guess what? Every single human being born in the United States, this minute, next minute, next day, next week, for years and years and years on to come, they're all born dead in trespasses and sins.
They're not being baptized. They're not hearing the gospel. They're not hearing the law convict them of their sin. They're not hearing that Christ has bled and died for their sins. They are happily growing up as pagans.
And you know what pagans do? They behave like pagans because they're pagans. And so now you've got a whole bunch of people within the visible church coming along and they're saying something like this.
Look at the evil that's going on in our church. We need to make our nation into a Christian nation. I sit there and go, well, of course, if you want to do that, then you better start preaching the gospel.
They're all, no, we need to enslave the blacks.
What?
How is that going to create a Christian nation?
So the reason why when Maryland was younger, the United States got a better grade and I was younger and they got a better grade than they're getting right now, is because the increase of evil is brought on by the God's word receding.
God's word being harder to hear, harder to find. If you want the government to behave more like Christians, then you're going to have to make more of those, especially in a representative Republic. But their solution is zealotry.
We're going to make a Christian nation. We're going to get rid of the United States and we're going to install a Christian monarch. And you sit there and go, are you guys in Colorado? Because it sounds like to me like you're smoking pot.
And so you'll note then that the United States is a government established by Christ. Is it doing a bad job or a good job? It's doing a terrible job. So what do we do in the midst of all of this? I would note, look what Ezekiel, look what Daniel did.
Go to the book of Esther. These gives us examples of what the church is to do while they're in exile. My citizenship is dual.
So is yours.
I am a citizen of the United States of America. My passport says so. I'm also a citizen of the kingdom of Christ. And that is not visible on this earth. It's, I can kind of see it here right now, but it's still a doctrine of faith.
And Christ, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, all of the provisional governments that he has set up for the purpose of avenging God's wrath on the wrongdoer, they will be, well, stepped down, if you would.
They will no longer be needed because there will be no evildoers in the kingdom that Christ is going to establish on planet earth. So the kingdom of God is not something of this world. It's in this world, but it's not of this world.
And those who are aping to try to create a Christian theocracy are on a satanic fool's errand. And they are off topic. They have lost the narrative. And they somehow think that they are going to be avengers of God's wrath.
And I've even had arguments with some of them. And I kid you not, I can produce the receipts if you want to see it. They say that once they come into power, they're going to force everyone in the United States to become Christians at the end of a gun.
And I sit there and go, are you out of your mind? And the reason why that's not possible is this, is that when you say convert to Christianity or die, the gospel is no longer good news. The gospel is law.
It's death rather than life. It's a confusion of law and gospel and one that is satanic. And the sad thing is, is that these folks think that they are doing God's will, that they are on the side of right, when in fact they are off topic altogether.
Should we vote for godly men and women to fill our political offices? Of course, I've been doing that for decades, ever since I could vote. Is it necessary for us to establish a Christian monarchy here in the United States?
No, absolutely not. That is not what it's called for. And so you'll note that we are at a time where it's time for us to kind of take a look at what's going on and consider the danger that we are in. Let me remind you of what happens in the book of Acts.
I love the fact that the apostles failed the final. So Jesus is risen from the dead. He's about to ascend into heaven. And so when they came together, they asked Jesus, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?
They still have some zealous residue going on here, still thinking in terms of theocracy. He said to them, it is not for you to know the times of the seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power and the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witness in Jerusalem and in all of Judea and Samaria to the end of the earth.
And when he had said these things, they were looking and he was lifted up. So you'll note that Christ wasn't interested in setting up a theocracy. And what did Peter do? Did he set up a theocracy on planet earth?
How did he end? As a monarch or a martyr?
Martyr.
The Apostle Paul, who was a full-on zealot, if you think about it. Did he die a monarch or did he die a martyr?
Christ has taught us to expect persecution and suffering from the state, not anything else.
So anybody who has an anonymous Twitter account and sounds like an edgelord, you're dealing with one, okay? Let's be blunt. You're dealing with your, they're like Gen Z, who can barely shave kind of types.
But what you're talking about, what you're looking for are people who, I would start with certain obvious things. If they're basically saying, is racism really a sin? Is it really, is slavery really a sin?
You know you're dealing with somebody who's been influenced by it. That's a start. Then I would, people who are talking about basically the need to overthrow the U .S. government and install a Christian monarch and that we need to have a biblical governmental system and things like this, they're buying in, they're full-on zealots if they're down that road.
Anybody talking about the great Jewish cabal and to enslave the world to, you know, in a Jewish financial system, they're also involved in this. You know, I'm telling you, Nazism of the 20th century is alive and well.
Unfortunately, it's among people who call themselves confessional Lutherans.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And let me end on this because I have to go. I'm already past my time. Here's the threat to the church, is that the church for decades, since I was young, we've been fighting the left and our fight against the left has developed some very good entrenched battle lines, if you would.
And so we've always been looking left to defend ourselves against the left. What the new alt-right is posing is a destruction of the right by redefining it altogether. If the right falls to these zealots, these theocracy types, then we've lost the confessional church and they're just the opposite error of the left.
And so at this point, we're fighting a two-front war. And welcome to Christianity today. It's just that much more difficult. But we'll talk more about this later. I got to go.
