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

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Opens With Scripture and the Program Theme

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 a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy 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 near 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.

God's Sovereign Plan, Abraham's Seed, and a Biblical View of History

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've got 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 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 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 it's just time that second coming, the tribulations go to come, and we just start to sit here, 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.

Israel, Hamas, and the Misuse of Prophecy

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 to 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 hasn'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.

Right.

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. 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. And why? 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 could 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 read, see in the newspapers? And I say, I don't get my doctorate 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 common place. 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 attitudes 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. Chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Joe Moorcraft after these messages from our sponsor.

The Church, Postmillennial Hope, and the Gospel as Cosmic Victory

It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners.

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Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland, who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed, Dr. Joe Moorcraft.

I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland. Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Plumbing, Georgia, are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Plumbing is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards, and Dr. Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight-volume commentary on the larger catechism.

Heritage is a member of the Hanover Presbytery, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

Heritage maintains and follows the biblical truth and principles proclaimed by the reformers, scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and God's glory alone. Their primary goal is the worship of the triune God that continues in eternity.

For more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Plumbing, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com, that's heritagepresbyterianchurch .com, or call 678 -954 -7831, that's 678 -954 -7831. If you visit, tell them Joe O 'Reilly, an Orange Sharpens Iron radio listener from a tie in County Kildare, Ireland, sends you.

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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 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 don't 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 that you're 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 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 their own theology on what they think they are seeing physically?

It sure is. You 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 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, anytime 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. But 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 a 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...

Oh, the Gospel is that the church must be humiliated in order to be exalted. Canaanite culture erupting the church in Jacob's day. The ancestors 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 saved 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 her 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 of 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 as a pastor 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 helped 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 was the greatest Presbyterian systematic theologian in the 18 -1900s and he was bragging that he'd never read a word of him.