October 20, 2023 Show with Dr. Joseph C. Morecraft III on “What’s Going On in the World Today”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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

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

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

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

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

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth.

We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 20th day of October 2023.

I am absolutely thrilled beyond words to have a returning guest today who has been absent from this program for far too long.

He is certainly, without question, one of my audience's favorite guests, and his name is

Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Westchester Cumming, Georgia, and author of the six -volume commentary on the

Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity. And today, Dr.

Moorcraft is going to be addressing what's going on in the world today and how the failures of the modern church got us here.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my old friend, Dr. Joseph C.

Moorcraft III. And why don't you let our listeners know about Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, especially for the sake of our listeners who are hearing you for the first time.

It's a conformed Presbyterian church and over Presbyterian. It's very evangelical, and it's thoroughly committed to the standards of the church set forth in the product of Reformation.

We have a small congregation. We're about nine years old. It's hard to believe we're that old already.

But we continue to grow. We have people that come, new people every Sunday from all over the place.

We just received a man Sunday in our church that drives at least two hours from here to Chattanooga every

Sunday to hear the word of God. And the church just continues to grow like that.

Plus, it continues to grow with babies. We have a lot of pregnant women. We have a lot of babies in the church.

And we do praise the Lord for the way he continues to bless us. We're thoroughly committed to the

Great Commission. We're thoroughly committed to world missions. We, in fact, finance a young man in Brazil who's probably the most influential

Calvinist in the whole country of Brazil. His name is Frank Brito, and I think he's been on your show.

Yes, he has. I've got to get him back. And we have much of our people are young adults that are very active in the advance of the kingdom of God.

Some are very active in the Republican Party as Christians, not as conservatives, not as established

Republicans, but as Christians. And some of them are involved in pro -life organizations.

And we do praise the Lord for every single one of these people. They come to church. They know why they're coming, and they want to hear the word of God.

Well, praise God for that. If anybody wants more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, their website is

HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com, HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com. And also, why don't you let our listeners know about your eight -volume commentary on the

Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity. I've preached on the

Westminster Larger Catechism for about 20 years, so these eight volumes represent 400 sermons on the

Larger Catechism, or on the word of God through the eyes of the Larger Catechism. The Larger Catechism was written in the 1640s.

It's still applicable today. I tried to write my commentary in language that everybody could understand.

It's not just for preachers. It's for homemakers. It's for young people.

It's for preachers. And it brings out the emphases of 500 years of the

Reformed faith in theology and in ethics. Well, if anybody wants more details on this eight -volume commentary by my guest,

Dr. Joseph Seymour Graf III, titled Authentic Christianity, go to westminstercommentary .com,

westminstercommentary .com. Well, you have provided for us a theme that is quite provocative and I'm sure is going to be quite controversial.

What's going on in the world today and how the failures of the modern church got us here?

And there are a lot of things that could come to mind when someone says what's going on in the world today.

Why don't you start with exactly where you are coming from in your desired conversation today?

Well, this subject you could talk on all day long. And you remember when

David, King David in the Bible, was gathering an army, the qualifications for the men from the tribe of Issachar was that they were men who understood their times and they knew what to tell

Israel to do. They knew what was going on in the world. They educated themselves in what was taking place in their nation and around them.

And they knew the word of God so they knew how to give correct answers to all the issues that their nation had to face.

When it comes to a question like what's going on in our world, we have to address it and think about it as Christians because most

Christians don't think about that issue from a biblical perspective.

There are certain presuppositions we have to keep in mind. And that is

God has a plan. From all eternity, God has determined that he would display his awesome power in carrying out his plans from all eternity.

So whatever goes on in this world today, it's not unhitched from God.

God is still sitting on his throne. He still is in charge. And there's nothing we have to worry about.

The second thing is to understand what God's goal is for our world today.

I've been preaching through the book of Genesis. And it's been a great encouragement to me.

You can get your theology, your eschatology, your ethics right out of the book of Genesis.

Particularly in the covenantal promises that God gave Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God told them that he was going to give them a seed and that seed would be none other than the

Lord Jesus Christ and all those who belong to him regardless of ethnic origin.

And that that seed would be more numerous than the stars, the sky, the sand, and the seashore.

And through that seed, that is through Christ and the church, every nation of the world will be blessed.

Not in some kind of general sense. But the third chapter of Galatians says that every nation of the world is going to be blessed by that seed with justification by faith and the gift of the

Holy Spirit. So you have the promises of the gospel all the way back there in Abraham concerning the future of the church and the future of the world.

And however dark and gloomy the world may look at this present time, and it looks pretty dark.

Remember God's goal is that all the nations of the world will be blessed with justification and the gift of the

Spirit through the seed of Abraham, which is Christ and all those who believe in him.

So do not let the darkness of this world determine how you're going to view the future.

We are to walk by faith, not by sight. We are to determine how we answer questions like what's going on in the world today, not in the light of what we see, but in the light of our faith in the

Word of God and what the Word of God teaches. And Christians today are so ignorant.

Evangelical Christians and many Reformed Christians, all liberals, are very, very ignorant.

They don't know how to look at what's going on today. And that includes preachers. They don't know how to look at what's going on.

I look at it every day.

I look on the Internet to see what people are saying. I really look at the sermons they're preaching.

I look at the lectures they're giving. I look at their podcasts. I look at their

YouTube posts. And they are a massive ignorance.

For instance, there is a flurry of all kinds of attitudes from Christians, thinking this is the end of the world, that what we see in Israel and Ukraine and around the world are signs of the second coming or signs of the rapture and the tribulation.

And so I listen to these people every now and then. They have no idea what's going on in the world because they have no idea what the

Bible teaches. There are some people that say that Israel, the ethnic

Israel, is at the heart of everything. And we read the newspapers and what the nations are doing to Israel is prophesied in the book of Ezekiel.

And Israel is God's people. And how they treat, the nations treat

Israel will show how close we are to the end of the world. Not a word of truth in that, that Israel is a state that was formed by the

United Nations in 1948 of unbelieving Jews. It's an ally of the

United States. But it isn't Christian. In fact, it's socialistic and it persecutes

Christians. But it's an ally of the United States in the midst of a whole

Muslim world. And when the United Nations created Israel, it guaranteed that there would be bloody wars in that district for decades and decades to come.

So when we look at what's going on, we don't sit back and think, well, there's no use in doing anything.

We should not try to change anything because this is just a sign that the second coming, the tribulations are going to come and we just have to sit here and play a guitar and wait for Jesus to come.

So we've got to get that idea out of our mind and yet it spreads like wildfire whenever there's any kind of big crises like this.

Now, there are people, if I could interrupt you just for a brief moment, there are people who are going to mistake what you are saying as coming from a cold heart of indifference about the horrific atrocities that are occurring by the hands of the

Palestinians in Hamas against Israeli men, women, and babies.

And what I have told people, especially during a time like this, is that although I do not believe that nation in the

Middle East that is currently called Israel is the Israel prophesied in the scriptures,

I do not believe it's any kind of a fulfillment of prophecy. They did not return to the land in repentance.

They are not, even admittedly from their own mouths, most of those in leadership are not even theists.

They're atheists and agnostics. But at the same time, I do believe that right now they are a very important ally in the

Middle East. They're not crying out for the death of America like the Muslim world is.

And we should have a heart of compassion for what is occurring in that nation.

Would you agree with what I just said? I would agree with you wholeheartedly that every nation has the right to defend itself against those who would destroy it.

And Israel is just a small little piece of land in an otherwise anti -Christian

Islamic world that wishes for its death along with the death of the

United States. Yes, remember, we're the big Satan. They're the little Satan, Israel.

We're the big Satan. Yeah. What they call us is the big Satan and they call

Israel the little Satan. Satan knows how to defend itself.

Only a fool would assault Israel and Hamas is learning that.

And I think Israel should treat Hamas and all the other terroristic states down in there like Hezbollah and the like the way

God told Israel to treat the Amalekites. Now, the Amalekites were

Old Testament terrorists. They would attack the weak, the vulnerable, old men, women, and children.

And so God specifically commanded Israel to destroy the

Amalekites so thoroughly that their very memory will be blotted out of history.

That's the Bible's words. So, like Governor DeSantis said in a speech recently, he said that Biden should get out of the way and let

Israel annihilate Hamas. Right. You notice that Biden has put restrictions on what

Israel can do, but he hadn't put any restrictions on Ukraine. Right. And so there is a war going on and it continues to grow.

First, there's Israel and Hamas invading Israel. Then Hezbollah from Syria steps into the picture.

Then Lebanon steps into the picture. And then

Iran is behind all this, financing it. And then

Netanyahu tells Israelis to leave Turkey because there's problems coming there.

And so it continues to spread. And if we're not careful, it will spread far beyond the

Middle East. But understand, if it does, it's not the end of the world.

And the world's on fire. You have Ukraine and you have

Russia. And by the way, there's probably a civil war going on in Israel.

There's a civil war going on in Hamas. The one group of people over there that we should pity are the

Palestinian Christians. Right. The Palestinian Christians were there before anybody was there.

They were there before the Jews. They were there before the Muslims. And they're persecuted by everybody.

So we should keep the Palestinian Christians in our prayers. And so why is all of this happening?

That's the question we should ask. Why is it all happening? Why does the world seem to be on fire?

And even though China threatens us every now and then, I don't think people realize that China's economy is bankrupt and that it can't survive much longer the way it is.

And our society, our economy, is on the verge of bankruptcy.

And we have, our country's on fire. The big cities are on fire, literally.

Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Atlanta, where people are burning down buildings and killing people every day.

And where policemen are not allowed to deal properly with these criminals lest they be punished by their superiors.

The world is on fire. And why? Several reasons. Number one, because of what

Isaiah 3 says, that when a nation rebels against God, when the church of God rebels against him, he removes effective leadership.

And that country is led by people who are weak and irresponsible and reckless.

And that is the picture that we're presenting to the world today.

We are weak. Christianity's leadership is weak. And we who hate

Christianity must now have now the opportunity to advance our strategies, to take more land, to express more power, because we know great

Christian America will do nothing about it and can do nothing about it. I don't even know if our armies, our military can win a war, because it's more concerned with making sure that the homosexuals are accepted, the transgender people are accepted in the military, than they are with killing the enemy and winning a war.

Yeah, this nation has developed the insane idea that serving in the military, protecting the citizens of this nation, and even protecting the existence of this nation, is a right, not a privilege.

Yeah. I mean, we have people in leadership in the

United States who are deliberately and self -consciously seeking to de -Christianize

America and criminalize Christianity in this country.

They're not doing it accidentally. They're not doing it out of ignorance.

They know exactly what they're doing. They're wanting to remake the

United States into their image and to destroy the last remnant of a

Christian moral and social order. And the church, because of its preachers and its seminaries, has not been taught that it's in a war.

It's in a life -or -death cultural religious war for the survival of the church.

And it always has been, all the way back to Cain and Abel, that in the book of Genesis, one of the things you learn right off is there cannot be synthesis.

There cannot be any peaceful coexistence between the church and the world. Because if there is, the church will look more and more like the world and less and less like the church, and then

God will treat the church like the world, that is, his enemies. So I would hope that your listeners would read and reread, read and reread the book of Genesis.

Why did Noah's flood take place? Noah's flood took place because the

Lion of Cain, intermarried with the Lion of Seth, the ungodly lion married with the godly lion.

They let their children marry non -Christians, and evil and violence accelerated in the world until God finally said,

I'm just going to wipe the earth clean. And so he drowned hundreds of thousands of people just to protect his people.

So that's the reason God sent Israel to Egypt.

You can pick up where you left off there about why God sent

Israel to Egypt, but I just wanted to take one question first before we go to our first commercial break.

All right. And then we will pick up on why God sent

Israel to Egypt when we return from that break. But the questioner, who is

Roberto, in College Place, Washington, says, how do you respond to those who are vehemently opposed to post -millennialism because they look around them and see the world getting worse and worse right now, things happening like parents allowing their children to have gender reassignment surgery and then be pumped with drugs in order to so -called change their gender, and the nightmares that we see going on right now in the

Middle East, and I could go on and on and on with how satanic this world is, and those who are anti -post -millennial say, this in and of itself disproves post -millennialism because we're not getting better.

How do you respond to this? I agree with him in that the world is at least as evil as he said it was.

And that's why 1 John says, love not the world. These are things that are in the world.

World doesn't mean trees and birds and animals. It means human society organized and built upon a principle of revolt against God.

The world has always been evil, and the world will always be evil, but I determine my view of the future not on what

I see around me but on what God teaches in his word because if I based my view of the future on what

I see, I would never be a post -millennialist at all.

I'd be the most pessimistic, defeated person you could imagine. But somebody asked me one time, they said, how can you be so optimistic about the future in the light of what we see in the newspapers?

And I say, I don't get my doctrine out of the newspapers. So if we can just get

Christians to read the Bible and understand what a worldview is,

I can remember 45 years ago, worldview was not a very commonplace.

In fact, when we wanted to preach on worldviews, we had to use a German word,

Weltanschauung, because we didn't know what a worldview was.

We only saw the gospel as something that keeps you from going to hell when you die, but it is that.

But the gospel is far bigger. Jesus Christ is not a personal savior.

We've got to quit talking about him as a personal savior. He does save individuals, but he's a cosmic savior.

His intention is to save his church in his world. And we've got to read the

Bible and quit determining what we're going to believe and our attitude toward the future by what we see, because we would have every reason to be pessimistic, therefore.

So when I see what's going around me today, I hate what's going on today. It reveals the evil of the world.

It reveals the evil of a backslidden church, because as long as preachers do not preach the truth, as long as the church is compromised, as long as the church is apostate or leaning toward apostasy, the world will always be like it is today as God's response to the church's rebellion.

And we are going to pick up where you left off when we return from our first break. If anybody wants to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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We're now back with Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft, the third pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia, and author of the eight -volume commentary on the

Westminster Larger Catechism known as Authentic Christianity. If you have a question, our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com ChrisArnzen at gmail .com Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

We are talking about what's going on in the world today and how the failures of the modern church caught us here.

One thing I wanted to mention, Dr. Moorcraft, you had mentioned before we went to the commercial break, that we cannot determine the future by what we see around us right now.

Isn't a lot of the theological failure of churches and denominations and individuals outside of the

Reformed faith is that not only do they wrongly understand the future, they don't understand a great deal of Christian theology because they are basing it on what they see with their own eyes physically.

For instance, I'll give you some examples. They disagree with total depravity because they see people coming to Christ and apparently when you're just watching and hearing and experiencing someone, even yourself, coming to Christ, you are thinking they, or yourself, are doing this from your own free will.

And you could also include in that many other things like whether or not a true Christian, a truly born again, regenerate person can lose their salvation.

People come to the wrong conclusion about that because they see with their own eyes someone that they've known and loved for years who might have even been a pastor that they've learned greatly from, and then one day you find out that the man has renounced the faith, has left his wife, moved in with his girlfriend, 30 years his junior, and never to speak about the

Word of God again. And you say to yourself, well, that man lost his salvation because of what I see, or saw, and we could go on and on and on with examples of that.

Isn't that like a major problem with those outside of Reformed Christianity because they're basing theology on what they think they are seeing physically?

It sure is. And as a result, they don't even know what the gospel is.

I don't want to be hypercritical, but the average evangelical Christian today does not know what the gospel is.

And he thinks he does. And he doesn't realize that what he believes today is the same thing that Roman Catholicism believed throughout medieval history for a thousand years.

It's the same thing that was condemned by the entire Protestant Reformation Church in 1619 at the

Synod of Dort when the entire church condemned the teachings of a man named

Jacob Arminius. They don't realize, they think, well, the churches always believe what we believe is the gospel.

And that is a lie. The churches, any time there's been elements in the church that believes what most evangelicals believe today, it has been condemned as heresy.

And Paul said, if I preach to you any other gospel, if anybody comes to you and preaches any other gospel, then what

I preach to you, let him be accursed. So it's not an exaggeration to say, it's not being mean to say that the church does not know what the gospel really is.

They think, the church thinks that the gospel is simply telling people that Jesus is a personal

Savior who came to save you from hell. That's true.

Or to improve your life. Or to improve your life. Many of them don't even mention hell. Sir? Yes, can you hear me?

I said many of them don't even mention hell. They just talk... Oh, that is true. That's true.

But it's a lot bigger than that. And that's why I tell them to study the book of Genesis. The reason that God had

Jacob's sons sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt is that God was setting them up to protect them and to insulate them from Canaanite culture.

By humiliating them and putting them in slavery in Egypt until God raised up Moses to deliver them from slavery.

Moses. And therefore, it...

What was I saying? You were talking about... The gospel is that the church must be humiliated in order to be exalted.

That Canaanite culture was corrupting the church in Jacob's day.

Judah, the ancestor of Christ, committed adultery with his daughter -in -law.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had more than one wife. And they were acting more like Canaanites than they were

Christians. So God had to pick them up out of Canaanite culture and humiliate them for a while in slavery in Egypt to insulate them from the influence of the

Canaanites. And he raised up Joseph. Joseph became the savior of the church.

And Joseph saved the church of Jacob's day the same way

Christ saves the church in all of time by humiliation and exaltation.

Jesus took upon himself the form of a slave, died the death of the cross, and then

God raised him up and gave him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess.

So God's going to have to humiliate the church because of her rebellion and because of her synthesis to insulate her from this evil culture, to purge her of the influences of the culture that's already showing up in her.

Because God's not going to exalt her to greatness and to be a praise in all the earth until first of all he has humbled her because of her sins.

And that's where we are. The spiritual condition of the church determines the condition morally, politically, and economically of the nation in which that church exists.

So why are we having all these problems? Why do we have leaders that want us to be less and less

Christian? Why are our leaders in our society becoming more and more vicious?

More and more perverted? More and more violent? Why is the world on fire?

It is God humbling the church and pushing her toward repentance because for over a century she has been declining spiritually and theologically and ethically.

And a lot of that has to do with the preachers who don't preach the truth anymore because they went to seminaries that didn't preach the truth.

Larry McDonald said one time he was a United States congressman.

He said, you can't get the mud out of the stream until you get the hogs out of the spring.

And we're not going to get rid of the theological apostasy and compromise in the church until we get the hogs, the liberals out of the seminaries.

And don't send our men to seminaries that will preach falsehood. In fact, we don't even have to send them to seminaries.

I think the best seminary in the country is Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. I went to a liberal seminary.

I think they can be if these men that God has called in the past are men of faith, submitted to the

Word of God, they can train these young men themselves. There are several young men around the country that I help train for the ministry.

They're better than I am. They're smarter than I am. They're going to be better preachers than I am.

But I know what books to read. And I know what books to tell them to read.

To look at the giants of the faith. I had a theology professor at Columbia Theological Seminary.

He was the professor of systematic theology. And he bragged that he'd never read a word of Benjamin Warfield in his life.

Benjamin Warfield's the greatest Presbyterian systematic theologian in the 18 -1900s.

And he was bragging that he'd never read a word of him. So our

Presbyterians are dominated by people who hate the truth. As a result, they have lost all discernment.

They can no longer discern what's good and what's bad. They're tolerant. They are tolerant of everything and every viewpoint and every perspective except one.

And that one perspective that they are intolerantly against is the view of historic, biblical, consistent

Calvinism and the Reformed faith. Yes, when you described

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, you described the

Presbytery as small, and I was going to mention, but I let it ride, but now

I see a very proper time to insert this. To hear the phrase small

Presbytery is typically a very good thing, because if the Presbytery is large in Presbyterianism today, it is typically bad news that you have to be very careful about...

Yes, and eventually things will be different. Right. I'm absolutely convinced that someday all the families in all the nations of the world will worship the

Triune God with us. I'm absolutely convinced in the power of the

Word of God to change the viewpoints of Hindus, Buddhists, Humanists, Muslims, whatever, all over the world, to believe in the sovereignty of God's grace and the sovereignty of the

Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. And because people say, well, how can you be so positive in the light of how negative everything is?

Because I believe that grace is more powerful than the gravity. I believe that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.

And so these people do not scare me. They don't keep me awake at night, because I know who's in control of the universe.

And I know that, as the second psalm says, that the kings of the earth can see almighty

God and His Christ and the nations in an uproar and He who sits in the heavens in a lap.

Amen. Why? Because He set His King Jesus on His holy hill and He has given all the nations of the world to Jesus Christ as His inheritance so that those nations will either believe in Him or be destroyed by His righteous scepter.

You know, the great oratorio, Handel's Messiah. I have on Sermon Audio sermons on every

Scripture text in that great musical piece. And it is a great piece.

Frederick Handel and his friend Jennings, an aristocratic evangelical, were very aware of the

Enlightenment. And they hated humanism. And so they put their minds together.

Jennings picked out the Scripture references. Handel put the music to it. And they wrote this great piece.

It's about two and a half hours long. They wrote this great piece not just to be entertaining but to refute humanism.

In fact, you pick up right where you left off when we return from our midway break. Don't let us forget

Handel's Messiah. Folks, we're going to be right... Can you hear me, Joe? Okay. Yeah.

Folks, we're going to our midway break, so please be patient with us. We'll be back with Dr.

Joseph C. Morpreff III after these messages. Don't go away. Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing sixth grade.

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Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing sixth grade.

Do you know what they all have in common? They all require training, assessments and certifications. But do you know what requires no training at all?

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That's why Truth, Love, Parent exists. We serve God by equipping dads and moms to be the ambassador parents

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And Dr. Moorcraft, if we could pick up where you left off before the break. Yes, we were talking about Handel Messiah.

That's right. Great oratory written in the middle 1700s, and that's not getting off track.

Our subject is what's going on in the world and how's the church contributed to where the world is today.

In Handel's Messiah, which is a piece of music to it half hours long, you see how the church in the mid 1700s faced the cultural war of the

Enlightenment and of humanism. It did not shrink back in retreat and in cowardice.

It met the liberalism of humanism head -on by writing some of the greatest music that has ever been written to refute everything it stood for.

Most people, when they think of Handel's Messiah, they think of only one piece of it.

And remember, it's two and a half hours long, and it's all scripture. And the one thing that most people know is a hallelujah chorus.

Hallelujah. And it, they play it at Christmas, or they play it at Easter, or they think it has something to do with the second coming of Christ.

And it doesn't have anything directly to do with any of those things. If you get the order of service and see where all of the pieces of music fit in the whole oratorio, you'll find that Handel's Messiah does not come in with the birth of Christ.

It doesn't come in with the second coming. It comes in with the global preaching of the

Word of God. There are some great songs that they sing on great is the company of the preachers.

How beautiful are the feet of those that spread the gospel of peace. And then it says that God has given

Christ the nations as an inheritance, and he shall destroy his enemies that were his own scepter.

Hallelujah! Amen. So the point is, he's confident that the world is going to be saved through the preaching of the gospel.

It doesn't surrender. It is absolutely confident that the church will win, and that Christ will triumph in history before the second coming.

And every Sunday morning on the way to church and coming back from church,

I listen to Handel's Messiah. Now, if you're not familiar with it, go to Google and look up scripture references in Handel's Messiah.

And then once you have all the scripture references, listen to Handel's Messiah.

My favorite version is conducted by Robert Shaw, who used to be with the

Atlanta Symphony. And then once you've gotten all the scripture references in front of you and you've listened to them, go to sermonaudio .com

and listen to my sermons on each one of those passages. It'll take you a long time, but it'll be sanctifying and it'll prepare your heart.

You'll want to fight this battle. You won't want to stay on the sidelines. You don't care how many times you get shot.

You want to go forward because you know victory belongs to the people of God. That's the way the church has to think today.

We win. The whole purpose of this, what's going on in the world today is simply to humble us and to purge from us the influence of Canaanite culture.

So we'll go back and be what we're supposed to be. Amen. And by the way, you have reminded me that I've got to urge our mutual, very close and dear and treasured friend,

Bill Shishko, to do something that he used to do annually when

I worked for WMC Radio in New York, WMCA Radio, 570 AM in New York.

I worked there for 15 years as an airtime salesman. And every year,

I don't know how many years in a row he did this, may have been four, but Bill would purchase about a two hour block of time where he would play significant portions of Handel's Messiah and give commentary in between.

And I'm going to I'm going to contact him and urge him to see if he will do that for this. Amen. And well, as far as the failures of the modern church, you've already listed some of those.

How specifically have some of the the horrors that we witness every day in our culture, in our world today?

Tell us about why you believe that very often the church and its leaders are responsible, at least in a great portion, for why these things are occurring.

of leadership in the world. It's weak. It is pathetic.

And it has not done its work as being the leader in a world in terms of influence and the gospel and controlling institutions by the word of God.

It has compromised and given in to the Canaanite sins of our day, abortion, transgenderism, woke -ism, socialism, and all the rest.

And as a result, it is weak and nobody's afraid of it. Nobody's afraid of it.

You remember what God said to his people? He said, you could live in a

Canaanite culture and be faithful, be perseveringly faithful, be relentlessly faithful, and God will put a dread in the heart of the

Canaanites for you, the church. They'll not only fear

Almighty God, they'll fear you. And the church, the world no longer fears the church.

The church isn't going to condemn them. The church is going to tolerate them. The church is not going to discern whether to hate or love somebody.

The church isn't going to preach the truth. And so the nations of the world have no dread for the church.

And once the world starts to dread the church again and starts being afraid of us because they know they can't attack us, because the power of Almighty God is behind us, then the church will take its place of leadership in the world.

And then we'll see the cowardice of the enemies of God as they flip back under their rocks and into darkness.

Amen. And we do have a listener that has a question that is going right along with what you have been saying.

Oliver in, I don't know if I'm going to mispronounce this or not, Kenduskeag, that's

K -E -N -D -U -S -K -E -A -G, Maine. Sorry if I mispronounced that. He says, do you think one of the greatest reasons that the church at large is impotent in our world today is because they put at the very highest level of importance, love, and that love that they exalt so highly is not even a genuine love.

They think it's more important to be nice to people and kind to people rather than be concerned for their never dying souls.

Tell them the truth. Preach repentance. And that, in my opinion, is true love.

Very good. That love is not lawless. Love is the fulfillment of the law of God, says the

Bible. And you love another person by treating them the way

God says that person should be treated. I just thought of another very effective leader in the 17th century,

Oliver Cromwell. God put him in a place of leadership as equivalent to the

King of England. He wasn't a king. He didn't profess to be a king. He was called Lord Protector. But he was the highest and most powerful man of all of England.

And he knew that God gives people power and influence in order for us to use them.

So Cromwell got word that the Pope had started persecuting again the

Waldensians. And the Waldensians were a group of Christians in northern

Italy, in central Europe, that had been there for centuries. The Pope persecuted them back in the

Middle Ages, and then the persecution stopped. And so then the

Pope started allowing Irish Catholics to come down to middle

Europe and to kill the Waldensians and take their farms. And so what did

Cromwell do? Did he say simply, I wish they didn't do that?

I'll just pray harder that the Pope won't do that anymore. No. Cromwell wrote a letter to the

Pope, and he said in so many words, if you don't quit persecuting my brothers and sisters, the

Waldensians, I will send my army to Rome and burn Rome to the ground.

Now the New Model Army had never lost a fight in its life. So when

God gives somebody influence and power and wealth, he intends for us to use it not for our own ease and comfort and pleasure, but we're to use that power and that influence and that wealth to bring the blessings of God to the nations of the world.

I don't know whether American Christians are even aware of the fact that thousands of Christians all over the world every day are martyred.

Whole churches, whole communities, whole families, are martyred by those who hate

Christ in this world. We think we have a rough time because we're made fun of and ridiculed and marginalized.

But there are people today that are facing death if they continue to be Christians. So we must pray for our brothers all over the world.

We must support missionaries to go all over the world. Our church has done something.

I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you things that the church can do. My local little church of 75 people three times this year has sent teams of about five men each time to go south of the border into the edge of Mexico and to preach the gospel to the cartels, to the tent cities, to the migrants.

And they've had the privilege of preaching to thousands of people. And now the Lord willing this winter they're going to go to Cuba and preach to the

Cubans. There's all kinds of things we can do. We can write music.

I have friends to this day that write books, that go to church.

Make sure you go to church or make sure you go to a church where the truth is preached. Encourage your preacher to preach the word of God as it applies to every area of life.

Do you know how a Christian is supposed to have a funeral? Do you know how a Christian is supposed to invest his wealth?

Do you know how a Christian is supposed to be involved in agriculture? Do you know how Christians are supposed to create nations?

Do you know how Christians are supposed to raise families? It's all there. It's all there in black and white.

And the more I read the Bible, the more amazed I am about all the various areas of life that it addresses and tells us, here's the way to go.

Walk in it. My word is a light unto your path and a lamp unto your feet. Walk outside that light and its darkness.

So if we can just get Christians to be Christians and to be committed to raising their children in the nurtured admonition of the

Lord, and be committed to bring people from weak churches or non -Christians with them to church on Sunday, so that they can hear the word of God, or to invite non -Christians into their homes for dinner or whatever, so that they can witness to those non -Christians.

If Christians would just act like Christians and quit being influenced by the

Canaanites, things would change, and they would change very rapidly in this country.

It seems to me, like you're saying, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, that the church at large has failed in being an influence that is taken seriously in all the major spheres of life, and that would be politics, the arts, that would be sports, that would be literature, we could go on and on and on, where the church typically fails in one of two ways.

Either they are compromisers and just absorb what the world has to offer in all of those things, or they become retreatists and have become almost monastic in their behavior, where they only remain within the circles of their own theological capsule of people and do not really have any input into other things that have an effect on the culture.

Am I guessing? Well, that's exactly right, that our preachers are teaching them that all the church can do is to save an individual here and there from hell, and to save as many individuals from hell as you can before Jesus comes and burns everything up, and nothing's going to be changed.

There's no use in trying to change anything, because nothing's going to be changed. God has planned that the world get worse and worse until the rapture, and as long as that lie is preached in the church, we're going to get nowhere, because your view of the future will determine your activity in the present.

If you're convinced in a ballgame, and you've been told that you're going to lose that game, you're not going to try very hard.

But if you're in the ballgame, and you've been told by God you're going to win this game, nothing can keep you from continuing to work until victory is secured.

Christians are easily chased off the battlefield. They're easily cowered.

They believe what the world tells them. They don't even know that the verses in the Bible in Corinthians, where the old prophet, where Jehoshaphat, is worried about his country being invaded by an enemy, and so Jehoshaphat was a godly man, so he was worried about that, and rather than just trusting in God's power, he made an alliance with wicked

Ahab of the northern kingdom, hoping that maybe by that alliance we can both protect ourselves from these invaders.

And then the old prophet came to Jehoshaphat and said, do you want God's wrath to fall down upon you?

How dare you love the wicked and help those who do not love the living

God. Now, most people don't even know such a verses in the

Bible, because they don't understand God. God's love for us guarantees our salvation.

God's hatred for his enemies guarantees their defeat. Amen. And I just want to give a shout out to one of our listeners.

His name, I usually don't give the full names of individuals, but since this person is involved on the staff of a very important ministry, and that ministry is churchandfamilylife .com,

whose president is Scott Brown, this individual's name is Brandon Vanderford in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and he says,

Dr. Morecraft was a massive influence in bringing me to Reformed theology.

I just thought I'd let you know that, brother. I don't know if you remember that name, Brandon Vanderford. Amen. And it's a blessing to see how even many decades after you became a regenerate, born -again,

Bible -believing Christian, Brother Morecraft, that the Word of God still moves you to tears, even publicly.

And that is something that has a profound effect on me, brother. And I appreciate you not holding back, even when

I'm doing an interview with you. And one of the things about what we are discussing today that gets people angry, gets

Christians angry, they think wrongly that you are diminishing the importance of evangelism and the purity of the gospel and being used of God to lead souls to Christ and to salvation.

You're not diminishing the importance of that at all, are you? Amen. Had a great influence on me when

I was very, very young, was The Soul Winter by Charles Spurgeon. And so evangelism and world missions are the spearheads of transforming a culture.

The primary solutions to what we have going on today are not primarily political or economic.

They are spiritual and moral. And so therefore, even though we get involved in politics, and I ran for the

United States Congress, and I speak to political groups all the time, whenever I have the privilege of speaking to a political group,

I preach the gospel because the gospel is the spearhead of the transformation of a culture.

And so every great period of revival and world missions in the history of the modern church has been led by people who love the

Reformed faith. Don't forget that the man who taught us to believe in predestination was the greatest missionary in the world, the

Apostle Paul. So somebody asked,

I've forgotten who it was, they said, why pray if God is sovereign and has everything planned out?

And of course, the answer to that is, why pray if he's not? Right. If we come to Christ through our own free will, unaided and unchanged through a changed heart, then what is

God going to do when you pray for the salvation of your loved ones? Very good.

One time I was asked years ago to preach in Boise, Idaho, to a group of people that I don't think they were of Reformed background, but somehow they'd heard about me and they wanted me to preach on the sovereignty of God.

I knew it was going to get me in trouble. I knew they weren't really, didn't really know what they were asking me, but I took advantage of what they asked me to preach on, the sovereignty of God.

So afterwards, a woman comes up to me as mad as a wet hen.

And she said, if God has everything planned out and everybody predestined who's going to be saved, who's not, why tell people about Jesus?

Why go around telling people about Jesus like you do? I said, well, first of all,

I just love to. If you love somebody, you're going to love to talk about it. And secondly, because evangelism is

God's foreordained means of accomplishing his foreordained ends.

That God uses evangelism and the free offer of the gospel to save those whom he chose for salvation before the world was created.

Amen. We have a person with a very nice name.

Princeton is the person's name in Hilo, Hawaii. Maybe the listener should rename himself

Old Princeton. But Princeton in Hilo, Hawaii asks, why is it that even some of the most conservative evangelical denominations and parachurch ministries have become very soft on the sin of homosexuality when it is so blatantly obvious that this sin is an abomination in the scripture and there is no mincing words in the

Bible about how horrific this sin is? That is a very important question.

I put the blame at the feet of pastors who have taught them that there is a difference between good and evil.

And God loves the good and he hates the evil. That pastors have not taught them such verses as Romans chapter one and two, first Corinthians six, all these places throughout the scripture that tell us that a homosexual is not born that way.

It is because he has deliberately defiantly chosen to live a perverted lifestyle and that he is in rebellion against God.

God wiped out a whole metropolitan area of thousands of people in Sodom and Gomorrah because it was a homosexual culture.

But you don't have to stay homosexual. If you're a homosexual, you don't have to stay that way because the

Bible says, first Corinthians six, they were people of the church of Carth who were previously, before their conversion, homosexuals, but they weren't that way any longer because of the work of the

Holy Spirit in their lives. Now, there's some states like California that has outlawed the recommendation of conversion therapy for homosexuals to say that a homosexual may be converted so that he's no longer homosexual is considered a crime in the state of California.

And so we disregard evil laws. No matter who believes the opposite, we believe the word of God, no matter what, that we don't buy this mushy view of love that says that God loves everybody unconditionally, no matter what they do, no matter what they like, that is one of the biggest lies that has damned so many people to think that God loves you no matter what you do.

That's not the case at all. That God's love is not lawless.

It is intolerant of evil. When you say that God is righteous, you're saying that God discriminates between good and evil and that he hates evil and seeks to destroy evil and reward the good.

And the only standard in the world, the only infallible standard by which we can determine good and evil is the word of God, the law of God contained in Holy Scripture.

Amen. And by the way, folks, I want to highly recommend that you listen to the recordings of two interviews

I recently conducted on Iron Turban's Iron Radio. One was with Patti Height, who is founder of Out of Egypt Ministries.

She was formerly enslaved by the sin of lesbianism and is now a new creation in Christ and has even been delivered from same -sex attraction completely.

And she was also enslaved by gender confusion, which is now currently today known as transgenderism and so on.

A fascinating interview. And also, I also interviewed recently on Friday the 13th of October my friend

Rosaria Butterfield on her book, Five Lies of Our Anti -Christian Age. And speaking of the listener in Hilo, Hawaii, and his question,

Rosaria informed me on the air during her interview, in fact, she chose my show to announce this publicly for the first time, that an evangelical ministry that has been greatly loved by many in the body of Christ and has benefited many in the body of Christ has sadly caved in to the lies of the homosexual movement.

And although they would claim homosexuality, if it is physically consummated, or even a part of one's lust, that it is sin, but at the same time, they believe that that can be a completely innocuous identity for a

Christian. And that was the defense of a debate that I recently arranged between Dr.

James R. White, who is opposing the thesis, is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's Church, and Dr.

Gregory Coles, who identifies as a gay Christian himself, was saying that there is no sin that needs to be repented of by simply being innately gay, as he would claim.

So this is a sin and a heresy that may be even more dangerous than those homosexuals who believe they can just pursue their lusts in any way they want, because this more palatable -sounding version of the homosexual rhetoric is much more easily acceptable in evangelical circles, and they're even inviting people like Dr.

Gregory Coles to speak to their youth groups and evangelical churches all over the United States.

Well, the PCA is eaten up with that view on homosexuality.

It is eaten up with it, and it is damnable.

It's not just actions. People say, well, I'm homosexual, and I'm okay as long as I don't act on it.

Well, we are whatever we think in our hearts, that's what we are.

We live like we live because we think like we think, and so it's desires that are sinful as well as actions, and we have just bought into this mushy view that we are to tolerate everybody as long as they're kind and as long as they're nice and as long as they don't do anything that's perverted.

It's just between them and God in their hearts, and that is a view that is eating their heart out of the church.

I heard a man speak, an elder in the PCA, and he was speaking at a

General Assembly, and there were hundreds of elders at that General Assembly meeting, and this man admitted before the whole

General Assembly that he was a non -practicing homosexual. Well, that was bad enough, because he was never disciplined for that, but what was even worse is after he said that, hundreds of elders in that room cheered and clapped their hands.

Wow, and as James White rightly pointed out in the debate he had with Dr.

Gregory Coles, when a defense is attempted to say that you can innately have as an identity homosexuality and it's completely innocuous and non -sinful in the eyes of God, because there's no activity involved in it, necessarily,

James White said in the same texts that Paul is listing sins that are sending people to hell, that his listeners, some of whom had repented of those sins and were washed and so forth and sanctified.

Among those sins was covetousness, and he pointed out that covetousness is not a physical action, it's a state of mind and heart that can lead to physical sin.

Very good point. And so he said we're not to be identifying ourselves as covetous

Christians, are we? And Dr. Cole said no answer for that. But we have to go to our final break right now, and so if you have a question you'd like to submit to Dr.

Joseph C. Moorcraft III, send it in now to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. We'll be right back. Have you noticed the gap that exists between the

Sunday morning sermon and the Sunday school classroom or the small group study? So often we experience great preaching from the pulpit, but when it comes time to study

God's Word in those smaller settings, well let's be honest, it leaves a lot to be desired.

It seems like it is nearly impossible to find good curriculum out there today that is true to the

Word of God and it's built upon sound doctrine, much less it's hard to find curriculum that will actually teach people how to study the

Bible. Hi there, my name is Jordan Tew and I am the Executive Director of the Baptist Publishing House.

Our ministry is dedicated to providing local churches with sound Bible study resources.

Our quarterly curriculum is titled the Baptist Expositor, and for good reason. We are

Baptist and we exegete the scriptures. If you want to have a curriculum that teaches your people how to study the

Word of God, I invite you go to our website, download a free study, baptistpublishinghouse .com.

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That's ptlbiblerebinding .com. Welcome back, and folks, please remember,

I know that you have been hearing every day commercials for the Historical Bible Society.

Well, don't forget that that organization was founded by my dear friend for decades,

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and please, you have to mention Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Dr.

Moorcraft, I really want you to conclude with a summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today regarding this topic.

They need to, if their preacher is not preaching the Word of God, all the

Word of God and only the Word of God, get out of his church. And then find a church where the preacher does preach the entirety of the

Word of God with passion and with power. And then, fathers, take the leadership in your home of teaching your children what you learned in church to be true.

And bring people to church with you on Sunday, unbelieving people, people from weak churches.

That's one of the most important things you can do is to bring people to church with you.

Get involved in pro -life organizations. Take the

Bible with you in the voting booth, and don't vote for somebody just because the party that he's in.

But does he love the law of God, and does he hate evil? Those are just some of the things that are absolutely essential.

And don't let your children marry non -Christians. Don't let them dress like non -Christians.

Don't let them always fill their minds with the same things that fill the mind with non -Christians, because you don't want your children to grow up to be

Canaanites and lose them forever. Yes, I remember hearing

Votie Baucom, somebody that both you and I greatly admire, say something to the effect, don't be surprised if you're sending your children to Caesar's schools, that they come back home little

Romans. That's right. Get them out of public schools. I think it's child abuse to send your children to public schools.

Well, brother, I want to make sure our listeners have your websites. If you are either living in the

Cumming, Georgia area, or you're visiting that area, or you have friends, family, and loved ones in that area, the website for Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia is heritagepresbyterian .org,

I believe. And now I've been saying it so by heart, but I guess I don't.

I'm going to look it up right now. But also, while I'm looking that up, the website to find out more about Dr.

Morecraft's eight -volume commentary on the Larger Catechism, the

Westminster Larger Catechism, go to westminstercommentary .com, westminstercommentary .com.

And once again, the website for the Church is heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,

I'm sorry about that, heritagepresbyterianchurch .com. And I am so thrilled, brother, that we are now able to resume our regular interviews with you.

I look forward to your return very soon, and very frequently,

God willing. And I want to thank all of our listeners, especially those who took the time to write, and I want to remind you all to never forget for the greater