The Strong Hold of Whiteness? And Some Other Stuff

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line. My name is James White. It's actually cool enough in Phoenix for this week.

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I was just looking at the forecast. We'll be back into the mid -80s next week. Stop that!

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We need a break, for crying out loud. Anyway, welcome to the Dividing Line today. While the rest of the world has been watching what's going on here, it's not like the rest of the world stops doing the things that the rest of the world does.

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And I saved an article about, this is from November 6th, so shortly after the election, from Uganda.

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And it is the story of a Christian pastor,

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David Omara, 64 years of age, pastor of the

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Christian Church Center in northern Uganda, who was killed on Saturday by Muslim extremists.

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The murder came after Omara compared Christianity and Islam in a radio broadcast.

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Evidently, you have here a situation where you have Christians who are seeking to do outreach.

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They are seeking to evangelize Muslims. And I would imagine that in that neck of the woods, they don't have nearly the range of entertainment options, shall we say, that we would have here.

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And hence, a local radio station is going to have quite an audience.

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And so, according to the article from discern .com, immediately after his preaching, someone telephoned my father, this is his son obviously speaking, appreciating his presentation.

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He then requested him to meet somewhere with some of his friends, said Omara's son, Simon Okut.

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We left the radio station, as we arrived at the said place, there came out of the bush six people dressed in Islamic attire, and they started strangling and beating my father with blunt objects.

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Okut said that as the assailants beat his father, one of them said, this man ought to die for using the

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Quran and saying Allah is not God, but an evil God collaborating with satanic powers.

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As they were hitting my father with blunt objects and strangling him, I fled to save my life. Two attackers ran after me, but they could not get hold of me,

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Okut said. My mother wept and fainted and collapsed with deep groaning and is admitted to the hospital.

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Okut's mother is being treated for shock, which rendered her unconscious. After electroconvulsive therapy involving stimulation of the brain, she still does not recognize people,

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Okut said. The killing of Omara is the latest of many instances of persecution of Christians in Uganda.

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A good friend of mine, I've mentioned this in a program before, many years ago, probably 20 years ago now, went on a missions trip to Uganda, and I attended the, when he came back, he did a group thing where he talked about his experiences in Uganda, and he's such a good storyteller, and I sort of felt like I went to Uganda.

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And one of the things that I've never forgotten about what he said was he talked about the seriousness of the believers there, and how, you know, they have nothing in comparison to the poorest of the poor in the

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United States. They have nothing. And they don't have much of the world's goods at all.

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And so they would have a tiny piece of paper and a tiny pencil, and they would write with the smallest of letters, just to save space and to save paper and to take notes during sermons.

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And you were expected to speak for two hours and then take questions for another hour after that.

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And this was just what was expected of you. This wasn't something unusual.

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This was just what they were so hungry. They had nothing else. They have no books.

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The time they come together is the entire time of edification along those lines.

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And most of them do not have a full copy of the scriptures. They would actually take Bibles apart and pass books of the

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Bible around between people so that you would have time to read certain portions of scripture, but almost nobody owned their own copy of the scriptures.

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And he said that the questions that they were asking were deep and theologically rich and showed a great deal of not only interest in the things of the

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Word of God, but a real theological knowledge. And I'll never forget that night.

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I think I've mentioned it to him over the years that that was an amazing thing. So evidently, the strife and tension that comes from the interface of evangelical

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Christianity and the honor religion of Islam. And that's really where the issue is here.

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Islam is an honor religion. In Africa, honor killings, in Arabic countries, honor killings continue to be very common amongst the

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Muslim people. The honor of the family, if a female child dishonors the family, her life is forfeit and in danger.

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And many Muslims feel that their honor faith means that they take their faith more seriously than Christians do, because Christians won't kill someone for them blaspheming

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Jesus or Paul or Peter or whatever else it might be, not realizing that in reality, an honor religion is very man -centered religion.

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If God is God, God will deal with his own honor. If God has actually, and though the nature of the divine decree in Christianity in the

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Bible is of a very different nature than Islamic understandings of providence and sovereignty in a decree.

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There are similarities, but there are fundamental differences as well.

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In Arabic, it's called khadr, and it really just means power, but when it's

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Allah's khadr, it has to do with the expression of his power in creation and in accomplishing his intentions in the world, which leads in many forms of Islam, not all.

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Westernized Islam will become sort of a hybrid in this issue, but Islam in its native context tends to become quite fatalistic, with Muslims saying inshallah, inshallah, if Allah wills.

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And of course we say, Lord willing, as well. Isn't it the same thing? No. The fundamental difference is in the

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Christian faith, God entered into time. The one thing that Islam says could never happen,

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God entered into time in the person of Jesus Christ. And in taking on that perfect human nature, he does not cease to be

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God. He does not become subservient to the power of time or the decree of time because he himself made time.

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But he has the power and capacity, if he so chooses, to enter into time itself in the person of Jesus Christ, which is what makes events in time real.

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They're not just, we're not just puppets. Jesus didn't become a puppet. Jesus did not become a puppet.

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That's a very important thing to keep in mind. And so from our perspective, God's honor will be defended, but we're not the ones called to defend it.

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Now, under the theocratic reign of the

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Mosaic law in Israel, you had very specific laws and you had very specific duties as members of the covenant community in Israel, so that if you bore the covenant signs and present yourself to the world as a member of that covenant community, then your behavior and your actions could bring shame upon the name of Yahweh because of their activities, because their sinfulness, the name of Yahweh is blasphemed amongst the people.

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So there was that element that had to be kept in mind as well.

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And so the Mosaic law, if anyone in the covenant community begins to say, let us go after other gods, even if they do so privately and secretly, even if it is your best friend in all the world, even if it is your wife, you're to be the first one to report this to the elders and the first one to pick up the stone.

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I preached on that passage. Like I said, when I did that series on the Holiness Code, there were some tough passages to work through, and that was certainly one of them.

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Now, did that have to do with God's honor? In a sense, but the idea wasn't that you were somehow doing something that is necessary to show

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God your faithfulness by expiating sin by killing the person who brings about the dishonor.

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The issue in, for example, that particular law that is made reference to, the person saying, let us go after other gods, this is a person who is in the covenant community seeking to destroy the worship of God.

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This isn't strictly about honor, that type of thing.

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This is the promotion of soul -destroying idolatry within the community. And that's a much higher and different level issue.

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But many Muslims do have the idea that if you will not kill a person who blasphemes your faith, then you just must not have as deep a commitment to it as somebody who will.

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Not recognizing that this is a fundamental issue of worldview. Jesus gave

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His life voluntarily for His enemies. And so, He has given us an example in that process.

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And so, the judge of all the earth will do right. The message is repent and believe because God has appointed a day when

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He is going to judge every man and woman by the one whom He raised from the dead.

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That day of judgment is coming. There really is, in the honor religions, a confusion between temporal justice and cosmic justice.

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In the cosmic sense, God's honor will be established. It's called theodicy.

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He will be, you know, the term is dikaya 'o. He will be justified for all of His actions. But God does that.

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And He does it through Jesus Christ. He doesn't call us to do it. That's not something that we do. So, we pray for the pastor of David Omara in Aduka, Uganda, and for the church there, that they would be strengthened, and that whoever comes to give leadership there or is raised up from within to give leadership there, that they will have the true blessing of God and God's protection as well.

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Unfortunately, that kind of story is repeated in Africa over and over and over again.

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It's happening a lot. There's a tremendous amount of Islamic violence there in the continent of and we pray for our brothers and sisters there.

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A couple things have popped up on Twitter before the program began. We have

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Natalie at Stop and Consider, someone I've been enjoying their tweets recently, and she had seen the same video that I saw earlier today.

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I don't know if you saw, if you've seen some of the video out there of people celebrating what has not yet been decided, but celebrating what has not yet been decided.

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One of them, and I've not discussed this, I think I may have mentioned it in passing, that there was a song that a couple months ago was the number one song in the

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United States. You can't even say the name without using vulgarity, and it is beneath the animals below us on the food chain.

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It is a vile, pornographic, anti -woman, it's just rebellion in its fullest extent.

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It was the number one song in the United States, and evidently they're standing outside the

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White House a couple days ago chanting this song, obviously not bleeping anything out in the process, drinking from communal bottles of champagne.

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And so Natalie writes, y 'all, they were gyrating and shouting

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WAP, W -A -P, at the top of their lungs looking like a hive of oversexualized bees, all while drinking off of a communal bottle of champagne in front of the

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White House. Go have your normal Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's exactly right, because I had also seen this morning or last night, someone posted, the

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CDC is putting out all these pretty little graphics about what you should and shouldn't do during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and yet you've got this type of thing going on.

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It's like, talk about completely ignoring whatever the

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CDC has to say in this situation for many reasons, and that's one of them. But yeah, it is a clear example of the level of depravity of the rejoicing crowds, that's for certain.

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And then the Chocolate Knox posted, came in right above it in my feed, something from the

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New York Daily News, some youngsters are regressing in basic skill sets amid school closures, a UK education watchdog group reports.

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They found an increase in distress, eating disorders, self -harm, even regression to wearing diapers.

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And when I read that, I thought to myself, all right, what is that saying?

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The public educational system, unfortunately, has become absolutely a part of childhood tradition and experience and things like that in many, in many, many places.

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And so having that taken away certainly has resulted in a very changed experience.

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But I don't think that's, I don't think it's just the disruption of the rhythm.

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Rhythm. I think it's the massive fear. I think it's the panic.

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I think it's living in the middle of the masked zombie apocalypse.

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I think it's the fact that when I go for a run, when I go for a ride, it's more,

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I see it more when I'm running, obviously, because I'm moving a whole lot slower. I mean,

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I'm doing big miles right now running, but it must be painful to see me running by. I make no pretensions to looking like one of those black

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African gazelles, those guys that run, well, they saw the guy that broke the two -hour, it wasn't official, but broke the two -hour time in the marathon.

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And just the fluid motion and the high stepping legs, take the opposite of that, that's me.

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In fact, I did a very long run yesterday morning, longest run I've done in five years, and almost six years, no, no, five years.

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And a couple of times I would stop and when

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I'd start to try to get going again, I'm just glad nobody was videotaping me.

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Well, they may have been, but they haven't made it public. Man, those first 20 steps are so...

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Come on, come on, you were doing it just a few seconds ago, come on. You know, oh, it's just, it's sad.

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Long torso, short legs, it's just, it's just ugly. But it's when I'm running that I notice this the most, is the people outdoors on a bike, walking their dog alone, and they're masked up.

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And it's just that, that inscrutable face. You can't see smiles.

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You know, I was on XM satellite radio, there's a station called 40s

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Junction, so it's 1940s music, and I listened to it because that's what I played when I was a kid. Well, a kid, when

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I was a teenager, when I was on KWAO radio, I played big band music because that's what I listened to.

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But it just switched over to holiday classics from now till December 26th, then it goes back to the 40s

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Junction. And they keep, and like so many of the radio stations, they keep playing songs that are more secular than religious.

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But one of the secular songs that means a lot to me is called Silver Bells, you've probably heard it. And that's because it was one of my mom's favorites.

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She really, really liked that song, Silver Bells. And I happened to catch,

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I caught myself thinking about today, because I heard it twice today. I caught myself thinking about it, because one of the lines is passing smiles.

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You're walking down the street and passing smiles everywhere. Everybody's smiling, even though it's snowing, people are smiling and greeting one another.

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And I started thinking, you don't see that.

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You can't see that. You cannot. It's amazing how much of interpersonal communication is done by the eyes, reading the face.

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And you can't do that when people are wearing masks. I cannot imagine the number of miscommunications, hurt feelings, broken relationships that have resulted, because somebody misinterpreted what somebody else said, because you can't see their face.

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And for people like me, you can't even really understand what they're saying, because it's muffled.

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It's social media in real life. And so I just think, when you talk about regression to wearing diapers,

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I think it's fear. They're seeing their society giving up everything that made it a society, being willing to just forfeit it all.

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And everyone's huddled around wearing diapers and face diapers. And you've just shut it all down.

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You're afraid to go play at the neighbor's house, because the police are going to show up and warn you and maybe take your parents away.

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I think that's why you have eating disorders, distress, self -harm, regression to wearing diapers.

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It's not just the lockdown in the sense of, we can't go to school.

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It's the pervasive cultural capitulation to fear. It's the constant presence of panic.

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And panic just eats away at the soul. It eats away at the heart. It's not physically good for you,

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I can assure you of that. Blood pressure and everything else, I'm sure, off the charts.

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If there'll be anyone around to do it, and if there is any way to do it, 10 years from now, looking back,

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I am very certain that the studies would say, wow, that was a massive overreaction.

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But I don't think there's going to be anybody around to do it, because I am firmly convinced that this massive panic overreaction is political.

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Absolutely political. I was talking to a restaurant manager today that hadn't seen for a long time.

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He'd had surgery. And so I was looking in on him. I heard he was there. So I was picking up something to eat. And so I asked if he could come to the window.

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And so we were talking. He appreciated that. I was checking up on him. And one of the things we were saying was, can you imagine

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January of 2020, if somebody had told you that in November of 2020,

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Kamala Harris would be the presumptive, was going to be the presumptive president by the middle of 2021.

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And could you imagine that that could possibly have happened?

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And everything that had to come together to bring that about, if there had been no massive panicked response to COVID, this never, there would have been no, you could not have drastically increased the mail -in balloting percentages by the way that they were increased in this year.

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And that's why, hey, I did show this. I suppose I should pull it up and show it on the dividing line.

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But May 12, 2020. May 12, 2020.

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I downloaded my entire Twitter feed to find this. But May 12, 2020.

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I, and I remember where I was sitting when I typed this. I said, I'm hearing about some big massive new spending bill, which is nothing but funny money now anyways, containing a bunch of money for mail -in voting.

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And I said, if they get, if the left gets mail -in voting, they will have complete control of this nation for 40 years.

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I said that in May 12 of this year, May 12. Because I had already called it.

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If the left, the left was already extending lockdowns and everything else.

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And I said, they're going to push this as close to the election as possible for political reasons. And if they can get it to do what they do in California, it's called ballot harvesting.

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That's it. It's all over with. Did they get away with it? I don't know.

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The media certainly wants you to believe it. All of the media wants you to believe it.

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They're setting it up so that if anything does change, if some of the numbers

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I've seen, if some of the situations I've seen, if the

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Supreme Court says, you know what, your law actually said election day. So everything beyond that, and you're going to have to do a recount and limit yourself only to actually verifiable ballots.

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Have you figured out, because you did what I did, how do they verify a signature?

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Because when I, when I went in, sorry, folks, I can go on to another subject just a second. But when I went in,

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I had to sign a screen with my finger. Then I had to sign the envelope.

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Now those don't look anything alike. Everybody who knows, who's ever had somebody hand them an iPhone where it says, sign with your finger.

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Does that look anything like your actual signature with a pen? No. It just, yeah, you just might as well.

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The screen isn't sensitive enough and you don't move your hand the same way. When you're holding something, certain muscles are in certain positions.

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When you're just sticking your finger out, they're in different positions. There is absolutely no way on God's green earth you can take what

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I signed on a screen and compare it with what I signed on the pen and say, oh yeah, they're the same. Not going to happen.

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So how do you even verify that? As long as there's a scribble on it, is that verified? I mean, that's, anybody who's sitting there going, oh no, you can't, you can't game this system.

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Yeah, the whole, yeah, that's, that's the problem. So anyway, yeah, revert, regression to wearing diapers.

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Well, there's, there's a reason for that. It's called fear. It's, that's, that's all there is to it.

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At the same time, when I, when I saw, when

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I saw a article today that said, in secret,

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Trump is talking about a 2024 run if he loses. I'm just like, ah, what can

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I say? Anyway. Okay. Everybody saw this.

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Let's go ahead and talk about it. I, I will confess,

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I have not been real pleased with the responses that I have seen to this.

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I understand that it is a day of, it is a day of emotions and strong feelings and division and, and everything else.

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But let me just say, I think we need to understand what is behind what is being said here, or there'll never be any kind of progress whatsoever in refuting it and warning other people about it.

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But this brief clip came out, I think, last night or maybe early this morning from Thabiti Anyabwili, which in of itself, everybody knows that's not his actual name.

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And if, and my recollection was, this is what's weird to me. My recollection was that, from his testimony, that he had taken that name during the very brief period of time, and I'm not looking over there anymore, so you might as well just go over here.

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During the very brief period of time when he was a Muslim. And if I'm correct, then, then my,

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I've never fully understood why you'd maintain that name when you leave

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Islam. And so anyway, it's certainly not the easiest word, easiest name in the world to, to pronounce.

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That's, that's for certain. But anyway, Thabiti is doing a lot of discussion, a lot of presentation of the woke church these days.

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And I commented to someone on Twitter today, I said, someone said, man, he certainly has moved long ways, hasn't he?

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I said, you know, we all see that out here. I'm, I'm, I think he probably thinks he hasn't changed.

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Or if, if he has changed, he would view it merely as a deepening of pre -existing commitments.

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That's my, that's my gut. You know, maybe he's said otherwise, and I just haven't heard it. But that would be my gut feeling.

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But I think what, what concerned me about a lot of the responses to this, because I just posted it and said, I'm just gonna drop this here and let people think about it.

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Not a lot of the responses were where they needed to be. Let me just put it that way. So let's, let's take a listen to this.

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It's fairly short, but I want you to understand what's being said. And then we'll talk about it on the other side.

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Uh -oh. You got it? Well, I'm plugged in here and I've got sound there.

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Um, okay. Uh, that's never happened before.

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Uh, let's, uh, try, well, look at that.

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Um, and pushback and this, this inability, even to, for as much as it, it chafes some people, even, even the language of white supremacy or the language of racism and alleging racism.

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Um, when you see some of the strident pushback and this, this inability, even to acknowledge that the extermination of native peoples was, was, was, was, was what it was, it was a genocide.

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Um, you realize that there's a kind, there's a root of pride there that, that is resistant to repentance, is resistant to culpability, is resistant to any form of redress or reparation.

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Uh, this strong hold of, of, of sort of whiteness and white identity and pristineness, um, is really part of what keeps us from making progress on this.

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Because if, for Christians in particular, it should not be any threat to admit wrong.

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We have a savior that atoned for it. We have a cross that carries it away. We have a resurrection that brings justification and righteousness.

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Um, but it requires repentance, right? And, and the other thing you get is this refusal to sort of acknowledge any kind of group level, systematic kind of, of sin, uh, and injustice, right?

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Uh, it's all boiled down to this individualism, this American individualism that goes along with that triumphalism and those stories.

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Um, and as long as people are resistant to that, it's going to mean a number of things. It's going to mean that, that we, we, our progress will be slow.

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It'll be hard fought and slow, but it also means that those Christians are going to be unable to read their

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Bibles, significant portions of their Bibles, particularly the prophets, uh, who speak to Israel and speak to power and call them to repent of those same kind of systematic injustices and systematic sins and call them to smash the idols of, of pride, of national and nationalistic pride that God disdains.

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And it's the same kind of sin that we see in this country, that triumphalism, that exceptionalism. It's the same kind of sin that the prophets railed against, but there's a blindness over the eyes of Israel.

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That's a blindness over the eyes of America when it comes to repenting of that. Okay. So let's, let's, let's think about, uh, what is, what was being said there?

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I have no idea what that didn't work initially, but, um, anyway, uh, it's like I said,

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I was disappointed with the responses, which were just rather dismissive, didn't interact with what was actually being argued and said.

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Um, but there is a notice that some of the things were said there, the stronghold of whiteness plus white identity plus pristine -ness is really part of what keeps us from making progress.

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Now, obviously whiteness is a term that is being used that has no logical, rational, consistent meaning in the current social context.

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Can we at least agree on that? It, we have seen it used in three dozen different ways, contradictory ways, inconsistent ways.

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What is whiteness? Nobody knows. Nobody has a clue. When a black person acts like a white person, is that whiteness?

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Um, when, when a white person sins and a black person sins in the exact same way, is that whiteness?

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Nobody knows. It is, it is absolutely pure play -doh that all everybody knows is whiteness is bad and you're guilty of it and there's nothing you can do about it.

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That's about all there is. When you say, but I, but I want to know what it is. Well, I can't really tell you.

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And white identity, white identity is, is that's bad, but black identity is good.

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How about Asian identity, Hispanic identity? Uh, how about, um, uh,

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Kentuckian identity, Alaskan identity? How about Canadians? Everything's white in Canada.

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Um, you know, I, I, I, white identity. So the stronghold of whiteness.

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Now, let me just point something out to you. There is no such thing as the stronghold of whiteness in any of the prophets of Scripture.

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They know nothing of this. Never heard of it. Didn't prophesy its coming. Did not speak against it.

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There's, there's nothing about strongholds of whiteness, strongholds of white identity.

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This is unbiblical gibberish. It does not come from Scripture.

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It does not come from exegesis. You have to drag it in over here and try to attach it to something.

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No prophet. You read the prophets, please read the prophets, read them in context, read them, read them in their historical context, find out about what was going on in Northern Southern kingdoms and all that.

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Learn about the minor prophets, the major prophets, all of them struggle with Ezekiel.

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You will struggle with Ezekiel. God asks Ezekiel to do things that you just go, what? Whoa, tough.

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This is hard. It is, but none of them said anything about the woke church.

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None of them said anything about the stronghold of whiteness. And you might say, well, it's because it hadn't come yet.

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Well, but so there's something new under the sun as far as sin is concerned. Read the prophets and then watch as this stuff is crammed into them from outside.

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That's what the woke church is all about. So the stronghold of whiteness, the stronghold of white identity and the stronghold of pristineness.

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Now, my guess is because this was derived from a thing where they were talking about American exceptionalism and what is

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American exceptionalism? American exceptionalism is the recognition that because of the centrality, look, the

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United States, the experiment that was the United States, that may be coming to an end as far as the constitution is concerned.

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What made the United States exceptional, and in world history, the United States has been exceptional.

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The speed at which this nation came to absolute supremacy in the world, economically, politically, and militarily has never been paralleled by any other nation.

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That's exceptional. You know who believed in American exceptionalism?

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Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Navy. Yamamoto told the general staff before the attack on Pearl Harbor that if they were going to do what they're going to do, if the

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United States did not sue for peace within six months, that they would be crushed. He knew even though their

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Navy was superior, their training was superior, he knew that in a very rapid period of time, the

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United States would be able to gear up and simply crush Imperial Japan by numbers and force of arms.

40:43

And that's exactly what happened. Six months after Pearl Harbor, the

40:49

Battle of Midway, three American carriers versus the lead group of four

40:54

Japanese carriers, much better trained, much more experienced. But we broke their code.

41:00

We knew they were coming. We ambushed them. And we won the Battle of Midway.

41:06

We only had three carriers, and we had to rush Yorktown out to even do that. That was 42.

41:17

So within two years, when we are moving into the carriers backing up those invasion troops, 45.

41:33

We had three. Two years later, we have fleets of 45. Yamamoto was right.

41:38

That's exceptional. That's what we're talking about. We talk about American exceptionalism. And the governmental system that gave rise to that was exceptional because it took from the best of the

41:52

Christian tradition from Europe and got rid of the incrustations of royalty.

42:00

It got rid of that. That's why there was so much discussion in the Federalist Papers and in that time period.

42:07

There's so much discussion about trying to keep the presidency from becoming a parallel to a king, which is a problem we're having today, by the way.

42:20

Ruling by executive order, whether it's Democrat, whether Obama did it for eight years, Trump did it for four years.

42:26

Both are wrong to do it. But they had to because the left decided we're going to, instead of doing what's best for the nation, we're just simply going to vote in a block.

42:37

We're not going to do the bipartisan thing anymore. We're not going to do what's good for the nation anymore. And the divide in worldview had become so big by then that the

42:48

Constitution wasn't designed to survive. As I've quoted many times before,

42:53

John Adams, the Constitution is only sufficient for a moral and religious people. It's completely inadequate to the governments of any other.

43:00

He was right. He was right. That's all there is to it. But the point is that American exceptionalism is due to the fact that we took those elements of the

43:14

Judeo -Christian faith, we limited the power of man because of the

43:19

Puritans, knowing the power of sin, divided it out for the government.

43:28

And that was something that Europe didn't do. I mean, how many constitutions has

43:33

Italy gone through since just since World War II? We've had one. It lasted a long time.

43:39

I don't think it's going to last much longer, but it lasted a long time. That's American exceptionalism.

43:44

That has nothing to do with ancient Israel. Again, you can try to draw these parallels all you want, but you're going to end up really misrepresenting things in the process.

43:57

Now, have we ever been absolutely consistent in the application of our standards? No. No, we haven't.

44:05

That doesn't make the institutionalization of those standards a bad thing, however. And he made reference to the indigenous peoples, the

44:17

Native Americans. I'm going to have a lot more to say about this in the future, but I just would point out to you that if you'll do some reading, and I'm discovering that some of the better resources in this area are disappearing because they're politically incorrect.

44:38

Folks, we've only got ourselves to blame for this, by the way.

44:46

We, starting 20 years ago, decided that price and speed was more important than having local control of books that are published.

44:59

I mean, one of the most exciting things I used to do in Bible college was go to Bree and Christian Bookstore and drool over the books.

45:09

But then Amazon came along, and now how many of those stores even exist anymore? We all decide, this is so convenient, my goodness.

45:20

You type in a name, there it is, hit buy now, and two days later, sometimes the next day, it's on your doorstep.

45:29

Man, that is awesome. One thing we didn't see coming is now they get to determine what we can and cannot read.

45:38

I finished reading, by the way. I'm glad I still have this on the screen so I know what to go back to. But I just finished, by the way.

45:43

I want to make sure I remember this. Irreversible Damage, Abigail Schreier.

45:50

I mentioned it to you all. I recommended it to you. I finished it this morning,

45:55

I think, or yesterday morning, one of the two. Again, let me warn you, it's not a

46:02

Christian book. She's not a Christian, but she has imbibed a great deal of a biblical worldview,

46:11

I think through some Jewish influence in her life. And so she's come from a number of things that I certainly am not.

46:22

The answers she comes up with in many ways interface with what we would agree with, but then can't go nearly far enough because you can't address the spiritual aspect of things.

46:32

But Irreversible Damage by Abigail Schreier, the fanatical, cult -like craze of transgenderism and the destruction of primarily young women in the process, cannot recommend it highly enough to you.

46:51

But having said that, the publisher of that book was not allowed to purchase advertising through Amazon.

47:03

And the reality is, Amazon is censoring and will be doing much more censoring in the future.

47:13

This is the only way to get books anymore. I mean, yeah, okay, CBD is still out there, but it's tough.

47:21

I mean, I used to be able to go over to a place called Metro Center, which is going to get torn down or something eventually, but I think they actually just tear it down, if I recall correctly.

47:33

But there were at least two major bookstores. Remember Walden Books? Well, that's been a long time.

47:40

Barnes & Noble, Walden Books, and all those were so... They smelled great and they were so much fun.

47:47

Most young people have never even been in a meaningful bookstore at all. But you used to be able to do that.

47:54

You can't anymore. And now Amazon owns our souls when it comes to what they will suppress.

48:01

And what I was going to say was, I was noticing that some of the resources on the history, the pre -Columbian history in the

48:08

United States, I tried to get one of them on Kindle and it said, this title is under review.

48:15

Oh, really? Great. Thankfully, I was able to get it in printed form. I've got a new scanner.

48:21

If I have to scan it in and then do it that way, I'll do it that way. But be aware that that type of thing is going to be happening.

48:30

Just be aware of pre -Columbian North America, Central America, South America.

48:40

The term savage came to have a meaning in the frontier, but the way that the various Native American tribes treated each other, wow, unbelievable.

48:59

And that came up in this, as if they were just peaceful people living on the land and along came the white man.

49:06

No, actually they were not peaceful people and they were very busily killing each other.

49:14

And that's a reality that needs to be kept in mind when you're talking about. Yeah, but I'm talking about pre -Columbian.

49:23

Because some people say, well, that was just in response to the invasion of their lands. No, they were cannibalizing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years, long before the white man showed up.

49:37

But that's another story. We'll get into that at some point. But all of this identity politics, and like I was saying,

49:45

I think this pristineness argument is going back to this

49:52

American exceptionalism. We're all clean. Well, no, we need to be honest.

49:57

America has never been clean. America has never been perfect. But in comparison to the despotic regimes, many of which have fallen under our boot in war, that this nation raised more people out of poverty and sickness and disease and gave them freedom than any nation that's come before us.

50:31

Name one that's done better. Name one that's done better. You can't. So that's what quote unquote

50:37

American exceptionalism is. American exceptionalism does not mean that there has not been sin in our past.

50:43

What it does mean is that bringing neo -Marxist identity politics in to destroy the foundation of freedom and liberty, which we have fostered in this land, is the exact opposite of what you would think you would need to be doing.

51:03

So let's keep that in mind. So let me replay this, and I'll stop start this time, and comment on it a little bit more closely.

51:15

For as much as it chafes some people, even the language of white supremacy, or the language of racism and alleging racism, when you see some of the strident pushback and this inability even to acknowledge that the extermination of native peoples was what it was, it was a genocide, you realize that there's a root of pride there.

51:42

A root of pride. So my assumption is what he's trying to do is he's trying to draw a parallel between the pride of the

51:52

Jews and the nation of Israel in the possession of the temple.

51:59

Because remember, Jeremiah, the temple, the temple. We have the temple. God would never allow his temple to be destroyed. And Jeremiah is saying, but he will, because what you do in the temple is no longer worship.

52:11

All right? And then parallel that with the idea, in essence, that America is fundamentally flawed from the start.

52:23

So there's actually a connection, it seems, which I could not, I don't even want to believe that Thabiti could actually buy into the 1619 stuff.

52:32

It's just so historically fraudulent. He knows that. But it does sound similar to the 1619 project's idea that, hey, forget about 1776, forget about the constitution, forget about declaration of independence, forget about inalienable rights, all the rest of that stuff.

52:51

This place has stunk since 1619 when the first slaves came here. Which I stop and say, there was systemic slavery all across North and Central America before the first white man stepped on the shore.

53:09

Just keep that in mind. Just keep that in mind. Do certain tribes owe reparations to other tribes for that?

53:20

Are you going to do that? Let's keep that in mind. There's still slavery in Black Africa today.

53:29

The narrative that has been presented of this nice, clean, colored division where you've got all the oppressed and all the oppressors and they're easily identified by skin color, is a lie.

53:41

It is indefensible, historically, in any sense.

53:47

It is a lie. And many good people believe the lie. What else have they heard?

53:54

What else have they heard? It's just repeated over and over and over again. And once it's repeated often enough, you just end up believing the lie.

54:03

That is resistant to repentance? Is resistant to culpability?

54:09

Jared Resistant to repentance and culpability. So, again, we're talking about coming up with an idea here that repentance, in the

54:24

New Testament sense of what repentance is, is to be made identical with the nation of Israel as the covenant people of Yahweh, bearing the covenant signs, holding the position as representatives of Yahweh to the world, breaking that national covenant, living under the blessings and cursings of Deuteronomy 28 and 29.

54:53

All right? So, you've got to understand, most theologians down through history have recognized the difference between national repentance for the sins of Israel and the repentance that we talk about when we talk about our need for repentance before God.

55:14

Here you have a conflation of the two. And here's the problem. While they're going to say, hey, we have an atonement, it takes our sin away, but not for white people.

55:24

You will always have to be in the cycle of penance because they'll say, well, if y 'all just have to repent, that is agree with us about how bad the past was.

55:37

Well, that's already been agreed to. I mean, how many times has the Southern Baptist Convention already passed all the statements and all the rest of that kind of stuff?

55:45

Well, that's not enough. Well, what will be enough? Well, now you've got to do reparations. Well, once the reparation is done, what after that?

55:54

There is no end game because there is no final forgiveness. This is a new kind of repentance.

55:59

It's not repentance, it's penance. And there's a difference between the two. And it goes back to the

56:05

Reformation. I mean, this is the story that, you know, a

56:11

Luther coming to recognize the difference between attentium agitate, do penance, and metanoiaitate, repent, change, turn your mind.

56:22

When it comes to identity politics, critical race theory and the like, there is no end game. There is no end game.

56:29

So this is being said that if you believe in American exceptionalism, then there's an arrogance that means you never have to repent for what was done 200 years ago by people who look like you.

56:45

I would suggest to you that anyone who lives in this nation that drives a car, has a house, has running water, and has plenty of food is just as much a part of the nation that came from those wrongs as anybody else.

57:03

Your skin color is irrelevant. So they have to repent too, if that's what you're supposed to be doing.

57:10

Obviously, from my perspective, what you do is you look at where there's been failures in the past, and you fix it as we have, as we've done so.

57:19

But that's not what this is about. This is identity politics. This is dividing people up into groups, the oppressors and the oppressed.

57:28

And you have to have a mechanism to bring that about. It's resistant to any form of redress or reparation.

57:35

This strong hold of sort of whiteness and white identity and pristineness is really part of what keeps us from making progress on it.

57:47

Yeah, I have no earthly idea what pristineness means. I mean, I've got a hint, but pristineness, we all come up with new words all the time.

57:57

Because for Christians in particular, it should not be any threat to admit wrong.

58:03

Amen. We have a Savior that atoned for it. We have a cross that carries it away. We have a resurrection that brings justification and righteousness.

58:11

Okay, if that's true, why does each generation have to keep going through the process for what happened generations and generations ago if there have been

58:20

Christians before us who already repented? This sounds like some type of ancestral sin that's just being carried along based on what?

58:32

Race. Racial identity. If we can just identify with a race now, can we just identify with those people who have already repented and move on now?

58:43

No, of course not. Of course not. That won't provide you the division that you need.

58:49

But it requires repentance, right? And the other thing you get is this refusal to sort of acknowledge any kind of group level systematic kind of sin and injustice, right?

59:01

It's all boiled down to this individualism, this American individualism that goes along with that triumphalism in those stories.

59:08

And as long as people are resistant to that, it's going to mean a number of things. It's going to mean that our progress will be slow.

59:17

It'll be hard, fault, and slow. But it also means that those Christians are going to be unable to read their

59:23

Bibles, significant portions of their Bibles, particularly the prophets who speak to Israel.

59:30

Okay. So obviously what's being argued here is you will not be able to read your

59:36

Bible. He's not saying you're not going to read your Bible. What he's saying is when you read your Bible, you're not going to be understanding what your

59:42

Bible is actually saying. You're going to be blind to it because of your pride, because of your lack of willingness to repent for what somebody did hundreds of years ago that you did not do, and that there is no meaningful argument that you somehow are accountable for wrongs that have already been redressed over 200 years ago.

01:00:06

There are all sorts of wrongs that were done during the

01:00:12

Revolutionary War. There are wrongs that were done during the Civil War. There are wrongs that were done during the

01:00:17

American -Mexican War, the Spanish -American War. There have been wrongs done over and over and over and over again, and Christians that were involved repented of those things.

01:00:30

We can look back now and say it was wrong to do this or it was wrong to do that, but you're still held guilty for it.

01:00:38

It's been forgiven for people before you, but not for you. You get to do it all over again. And there really isn't any end game to it at all.

01:00:46

You just have to keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it over and over and over again.

01:00:53

There's no getting out of it. There's no getting out of it. That's highly, highly problematic.

01:01:00

Well, hey, as we're wrapping up here, I was just in the studio.

01:01:08

We're going to have to come up with a name for that. Are we studio one?

01:01:14

I don't know. I'm not sure what we're going to do about that, but I was just working with...

01:01:24

I tweeted a picture of Accordance up on the big screen.

01:01:32

Do I have it on this laptop? No. I mean, I have it in my tweet feed somewhere,

01:01:38

I would imagine. I haven't tweeted much since then. Yeah, there it is.

01:01:52

Well, I can't seem to get it to go big screen.

01:02:02

That's about as big as I can get it. So here's my digital whiteboard with Accordance up.

01:02:13

There's Romans 5 .1. It's over here. It's another big screen. And the cameras will be back the other direction.

01:02:25

That'll be one of the inputs. We'll be able to throw that up there. I'll be able to write on stuff and connect stuff together and do things like that.

01:02:32

And then we go back to the shot with me and the whiteboard and stuff like that. So we're not too far away from being able to start doing some of that stuff.

01:02:43

And Rich was saying, you know, maybe such and such a date, you know, we'll see.

01:02:50

And then once we maybe do a couple dividing lines with just us doing that, then we can zoom somebody in and see how that works and see if they can see us, we can see them go back and forth, do the type of stuff that you need to do there.

01:03:08

And then finally, we'll be looking at the debates. So there you go.

01:03:14

It's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff to do. Did you see David Hughes's thing on Twitter?

01:03:21

Here. What? I'm trying to...

01:03:27

I do not understand why this won't get big.

01:03:36

I mean, it's supposed to. But there's a gif here. And here.

01:03:48

Embed, tweet, block, mute. Pinned your profile.

01:03:54

No, no, those things. I wish I could get that bigger, but it won't get any bigger.

01:04:00

But did you see what they did there? Somehow he took that thing. It took that thing from that movie with Travolta.

01:04:11

And he put it in front of the whiteboard, the stuff that I had on it going. So what is it?

01:04:17

I don't understand. I don't get it. You're trying to get it. Yeah, there you go. See? It almost disrupted my train of thought earlier on.

01:04:30

And I did respond during the program. I said, LOL, well done. But this is how some people feel when they look at what

01:04:38

I'm doing on that white screen. But anyway. So we're working on it. We're getting close. We'll get it done the day before they cut us off of social media completely.

01:04:52

That's pretty much how it's always worked for me down through my life. So anyway. All right.

01:04:58

Well, thank you for joining us on the program today. And we will see you later in the week. God bless.