RLL. Ep.35: Just Shut Up and Do What You're Told

Hello everybody, this is Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me today for Radio Luke's Lucid. This is episode number 35. And the title of this episode is Just Shut Up and Do What You're Told. That's a pretty rude sounding title, I guess.

But there's a reason why I say it. There's a reason why I have that particular title. So anyway, welcome to the program today. I'm glad you're here. I think I have a pretty interesting topic for today.

The Culture of Being Told to Shut Up

And I wanted to maybe start by asking a question here. Do you ever get the sense that more and more you're being ordered by very serious people with very pompous sounding titles to just shut up and do what you're told?

Well, interestingly, Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus guy, Mr. Lockdown, he was giving a, I guess, I don't know if you, maybe you could call it a sermon. He was, this was a talk that he was giving at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, November the 12th.

And where he basically said just that very thing. He told people to do what you're told. Let me play a little soundbite here for you and you can see what I'm talking about. So here's Anthony Fauci.

I was talking with our UK colleagues just today who were saying the UK is very similar to where we are now in outbreak because each of our countries have that independent spirit but we don't wanna be told what to do.

Well, I understand that, but now is the time to do what you're told.

So there you go. There's Anthony Fauci, do what you're told. Now's the time to do what you're told. Shut up, don't question the mask, don't question the cases, don't question the death statistics or the hospitalizations and certainly don't question the lockdowns.

My goodness. No, you don't do any of those things. Your job, be quiet, do what you're told. That's Anthony Fauci for you. Now, not to be outdone, Nancy Pelosi herself had some things to say in a very similar vein about the election.

Let's listen to Nancy Pelosi here.

The election is over. Joe Biden is the president-elect, elected with a mandate of over 78 million votes. But don't take it from me. The Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said in their joint statement, this November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.

There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was any way compromised.

Okay, so there you have it. You've got Nancy Pelosi, she's coming out here saying, well, hey, the election was awesome. Everything was great, there's no problem here. And she even backs it up with some people and I think they were from the Department of Homeland Security, the people that she cited there.

They were saying, yep, it was the most secure election in American history. Now, you might say, well, but Nancy, but Nancy, well, what about the 138 ,000 votes that appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night in Michigan that just so happened to be just enough votes to give Joe Biden the lead in a state that Donald Trump was winning handily?

Or what about all those votes? I think it was maybe 200 ,000 or so in Wisconsin that just like in Michigan appeared in the middle of the night and just so happened, by golly, to give Joe Biden just enough votes to win the state.

Or what about the 700 ,000 vote lead that Donald Trump had in Pennsylvania and it just disappeared? Or how about in Georgia? Same kind of thing, had a big lead early and all of a sudden that lead somehow just vanished.

And what about all the dead people that voted? And what about all of the ballots that just got sent out to anyone who happened to be on the voter roll? I mean, there's nothing to be concerned about here, says Nancy.

There's nothing to be concerned about here, says the Department of Homeland Security. Just shut up already. Just accept that Joe Biden is president-elect and get on with your lives. We're in charge now.

Don't question us. And it's kind of in a way, I guess if it weren't so serious, it might be a little bit funny. I mean, you see this sort of thing. I saw something where Whoopi Goldberg was talking the other day and she was telling Trump supporters that what they needed to do was just suck it up.

You know, stop whining about losing the election, just suck it up. You know, of course, this is coming from Whoopi Goldberg who hasn't sucked it up even for a moment in the last four years. She has never gotten over the fact that Bill Clinton defeated or that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And neither has Nancy Pelosi or neither have most of the other liberals that are out there lecturing Trump supporters to accept the results of what I think is a very clearly fraudulent election. And not just a fraudulent election, but I think a historically fraudulent election.

The Democrats are trying to steal this election. Now, I don't want to, this podcast really isn't about the Democrats stealing an election. I'm just using that as one example of this sort of very top-down, very authoritative, very arrogant approach to government.

And of course, it's not just something that you hear out of government officials. You hear this out of big shots or the big wigs, or at least people who think they're big shots and big wigs in many areas of society.

Critical Race Theory, Climate Change, and the Transgender Agenda

Take another example here. You get the same kind of thing from the critical race theory hustlers. The way, according to critical race theory, if you're white, then you are a racist. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

You are by definition a racist because you are white. And the more you deny it, well, that's just proof, more proof that you're a racist.

Just shut up in a minute.

We're right, you're wrong, and that's the end of it. It's kind of interesting in that respect, or in this respect, the critical race theory is that it almost, its doctrine of the eternal guilt of whites for racism, it's like a twisted, perverted version of the Christian doctrine of original sin.

But whereas original sin applies to the entirety of the human race, the sin of racism applies only to white people in the minds of the critical race theorists. It's a hustle, it's a lie, it's a scam, but you can't argue with them.

You know, and there are people who have been fired from their jobs for arguing back. You know, if you say, well, I'm not a racist, and you say this whole thing is scammy and it's a fraud, well, you can be fired.

You know, you can be removed from your position. And people have suffered job loss because of this. And it's the same thing with climate change. You know, I mean, of course, they used to call it global warming, now it's climate change.

But if you question any of the dogmas, maybe you raise some questions about the science that was done, the research, maybe question some of the motives, or some of the people that are involved in this thing.

Well, you're a science denier, and you're worse than an infidel. And there's no discussion about this. I mean, you're either for us or you're against us. That's what the climate change folks would say.

And if you are against us, well, you're a dangerous person with dangerous ideas, and you may need to be imprisoned. And I'm not making that up, by the way. There are at least some people on the climate change side of things that have advocated imprisonment for people who deny the claims of the climate change folks.

Bill Nye is a very prominent example. You know, Bill Nye, the science guy, he's a pretty well-known fellow. And yeah, he himself has actually suggested that if you deny global warming, you might have to be sent to jail.

Or take a look at another example here, the transgender agenda. You know, if you deny that a man can become a woman or that a woman can become a man, you're in a world of hurt. I mean, there are people in very high-level positions who have lost their jobs over this or gotten massive amount of grief.

Even the author of J .K. Rowling, she's the one that wrote the Harry Potter series, has gotten in major trouble and received massive amounts of criticism for denying that men can in fact become women.

And again, this is the kind of an issue where your job can potentially be at stake. You know, you believe this, you have to believe this, and if you don't believe it, you're in big trouble. So just shut up already.

Or how about going back to another political example, how about Donald Trump? You know, there has been, if you work for Donald Trump, if you supported Donald Trump, well, obviously you're a bad person.

And as a bad person, you should be denied opportunity of employment. You know, there's a group that was recently formed called the Trump Integrity Project and wants to make sure that you never work again.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congresswoman from New York, you know, she's a good Bolshevik, and she's been out there advocating that people compile an enemies list. I guess maybe she has her own enemies list.

You know, if you're on that list, if you're someone who's supported Donald Trump or something she doesn't like, well, I guess she's going to come after you. Make sure that you don't work or maybe something else.

I don't know exactly. One would think maybe if she had the opportunity that it would be something much worse than just denying you employment. It was really dangerous stuff. And all of these examples that I'm giving are things that are sometimes called a cancel culture.

And cancel culture, of course, you know, that's the idea that, you know, that if you say something or you believe something or you write something that runs afoul of the woke agenda, well, you're in big trouble.

You know, you're a heretic in the church of woke and you must be cast to the outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. So yeah, cancel culture, it's really not a new thing at all. It's been around for a long time.

Martin Luther and Rome's Three Walls

Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, think about the movie Luther. You know, this was a movie that was from 2003 and, of course, from the title of it, you can guess. I mean, it's a movie about the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, and that particular version of Luther, it starred Joseph Fiennes in the title role.

And there's an interesting scene in that movie where it's fairly early on in Luther's career. At this point, he is just beginning to kind of get noticed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy for some of his ideas, some of his writing, some of the things he's been preaching.

And they're starting to think, eh, this guy may be a little bit of a problem. And he's called before a very powerful cardinal, a fellow by the name of Cardinal Cajetan. And in the scene in the movie, he's standing outside of the cardinal's chambers and he's being given some advice.

He's being coached on how to approach the cardinal. I mean, you don't just go up to a cardinal and say, hey, cardinal, how you doing? It's not like that. There was a certain protocol and there's certain things expected out of Luther when he went into there, when he went in to see the cardinal.

And what he was coached to say by this individual was one word. And this person told Luther, he was very serious about this. He says, when you go in to see the cardinal, just say one word, rewoco. Now, rewoco is Latin.

It just means I recant. So what he's telling Luther is, okay, all of this stuff that Luther had been teaching and saying, just go in before the cardinal and be very humble, say I recant and all be forgiven.

And you can just go on and live your life and do your priest thing and nobody will bother you. It'll all be forgotten, supposedly. Well, Luther goes in, of course, to see the cardinal. He goes in to see Cajetan.

And being the talkative fellow that he is, Luther just can't shut up. He can't keep his mouth shut. And he goes in there and he gets into a big argument with Cajetan and Cajetan gets very angry with him.

And I believe, if memory serves me correctly, I think he threw Luther out. So that meeting didn't exactly go super well. Luther did not clear his name. Luther did not say rewoco when he went in there.

He argued with the cardinal. And you don't do that. You don't do that sort of thing. I mean, it's like that old song, you don't tug on Superman's cape. Well, Luther tugged on Superman's cape. And he got himself in a lot of trouble, of course, as we all know.

And we can be thankful to God that he did get himself in a lot of trouble, that he didn't remain quiet. But his job was to go in there and to recant, to give up, to submit, to say rewoco and separate himself from the teachings that he had been giving, not to argue with the cardinal.

His job was not to argue. His job was to be quiet. Now, interestingly, the officials of the Roman Catholic Church generally, apart from Luther, had set up a lot of barriers to protect themselves. You know, they were a lot like today's arrogant politicians and government bureaucrats.

And since we're talking about Martin Luther, I thought I'd give you another example from Luther. This is from something that Luther wrote. It's a letter called To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation.

And in this letter, Luther used, it's a famous illustration he used. He talked about three walls. Now, the walls he was talking about here weren't literal physical walls. It was a figure of speech, a way of speaking.

And what he says that Rome had erected three walls to protect itself from any kind of criticism, any kind of questioning. And let me read the passage here to you. Quote, the Romanists have very cleverly built three walls around themselves.

Hitherto, they have protected themselves by these walls in such a way that no one has been able to reform them. As a result, the whole of Christendom has fallen abominably. In the first place, when pressed by the temporal power, they have made decrees and declared that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them.

But on the contrary, the spiritual power is above the temporal. So when Luther's talking here about the temporal power, of course, he's talking about the civil government, civil magistrates. So maybe, I don't know, maybe a king or some elected official or appointed official, some public official maybe argues with the church and says, hey, there's a legal issue here and we're gonna challenge what the church is doing.

And the attitude of the church was, well, you don't question the pope, you don't question the cardinals, you don't question the bishop. You don't have any power over us to tell us to do anything. We have the power to tell you what to do.

We have the power to ask you questions. You're accountable to us, but we're not accountable to you. It seems to be Luther's thought here. And Luther continues, he says, in the second place, when the attempt was made to reprove them with the scriptures, they raised the objection that only the pope may interpret the scriptures.

So maybe you try a different tactic and you say, okay, well, I'm going to say, well, the Bible says this, but you, pope, are saying that. And I disagree with this. The pope, the Roman church, the magisteriums, they're gonna come back and they're just gonna say, well, okay, we're saying that and you're saying this.

Well, you don't have any business questioning what we say. If we say that, then you have to believe that. You're obligated to believe that because we have the right to interpret the scriptures and what you're doing is you're just bringing your own private opinions.

And you need to be quiet and you need to obey. And just like Anthony Fauci said, you need to obey. You need to do what you're told. I guess that's what Fauci said, do what you're told. Believe what you're told and don't ask questions.

And then the third place, says Luther, in the third place, if threatened with a council, their story is that no one may summon a council but the pope. So you can't bring in a church council and bring in bishops and cardinals and other big shots to debate a particular theological point.

That's something only the pope can do. You as a private person, you can't do that. And so there's really no way to reprove, rebuke, or change anything that the Roman Catholic Church teaches or does. Now, these are the three walls that Luther talked about.

They're irreformable, the Roman Catholic churches. They're irreformable. Now, that kind of arrogance, this kind of sort of top-down, do what you're told mindset, it didn't even start with Rome either.

It went back well before that. And we can see that even from the New Testament. There's a famous passage in the New Testament, one you're probably familiar with, where the disciples are arguing among themselves.

Who's the greatest is what the subject of the argument is. And let me read that passage here to you and then we'll talk some about it. This is from Luke chapter 22, begins in verse 24. Now, there was also a dispute among them, talking about the disciples.

There was also a dispute among them as to which of them should be considered the greatest. And he said to them, he being Jesus, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them. And those who exercise authority over them are called benefactors, but not so among you.

On the contrary, who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger. And he who governs is he who serves. For who's greater, he who sits at the table or he who serves? Is it not he who sits at the table?

Yet I am among you as the one who serves. So let's break that passage down a little bit. What we see here is Jesus making a very sharp contrast between the kings of the Gentiles on the one hand and Christian people and the way they act on the other hand.

Now, what does he say about the kings of the Gentiles? He says, on the one hand, they exercise lordship over them. He's talking about they exercise lordship over the people. Now, this is the New King James translation.

I really like this translation here because the Greek verb that's translated exercise lordship literally means that, it's kuriazomai. It literally means to act as a lord, to act as lord and master, this idea.

And we speak that way in English, right? We talk about, well, I don't like so-and-so, he's very arrogant, he lords it over me or lords it over people. Maybe his money or power or authority or fame or something like that, and we speak that way.

We speak about lording things over people. And that's the way the kings of the Gentiles behave. They lord it over people. They're very arrogant on one hand. On the other hand, though, these very same kings like to be called benefactors.

Now, that's an interesting word here, benefactors. Let's talk about that for a moment. In Greek, the word benefactor, if you translate it into Greek, is the word eurogates. Eurogates is the way you say that in Greek.

And there were a lot of, a number of kings in the Greek-speaking world, and this goes back from Alexander the Great on up to the time of the New Testament, a number of kings from this vast area of Greek-speaking peoples, the whole area that Alexander the Great conquered, many kings had as a title, eurogates, so-and-so eurogates, because they wanted to be known as a benefactor.

Now, these are very arrogant men. They really didn't care, have a lot of regard for the people they governed or ruled, maybe would be the right word, but they wanted to appear to be benefactors. They wanted to appear to be these great philanthropists or humanitarians or something, and so they took this title to themselves.

But it was an act because they actually really just exercised authority over people. And then Jesus contrasts that with the way the disciples, the way Christian people are supposed to act, that Christian people are not to, who are in positions of authority, not to lord it over their fellows, but they're to serve them.

And this is the passage, so this is where we get this whole idea of government as servant, of servant leadership, maybe in areas of business or in the family or in other areas. The government officials are not there to lord it over the people.

They're not there to bilk the people and to use them as a way of getting rich, but they're there to serve them. They're there to protect their liberties. This is where we get the idea of government as a servant.

And of course, that's something that didn't really begin on a large scale until the time of the Reformation, when the gospel of justification by belief alone was rediscovered by Martin Luther and believed by, widely preached and widely believed throughout the nations where the Reformation came.

It changed society. Not only were people saved and forgiven their sins and brought into a right relationship with God through the mediator, Jesus Christ. Not only did that happen, but it also changed society.

It didn't just change individuals. It changed all of society. It changed the organization of society. And where you had very arrogant, very sort of top-down officials, all of a sudden the government became responsive to the people because that's the way government came to be viewed.

Government wasn't lord and master, but government was a servant to the people. Christ used himself as this example. He says, yet I am among you as the one who serves. Well, if Jesus Christ is one who serves, who is a mayor or a governor or some other public official?

Who is he to say, I'm not gonna serve the people? I mean, if Jesus Christ serves, surely a government official, a town councilman should serve as well. And so this idea was applied to government. And it's something that came about through the Protestant Reformation.

Christianity, Civilizational Collapse, and Cancel Culture

Now, kind of to bring that back to what we were talking about originally, how does that all relate to cancel culture? Well, cancel culture, and what I hope you've gotten out of some of this is that cancel culture is not a new thing.

It's something that's been around for a very long time. It's something that was put aside in the West because of the rise of Christianity, because of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But now what we're doing is we're seeing a return of that.

And the reason we're seeing a return of that, cancel culture, is because Christianity is disappearing from the West. So this idea that shut up, sit down, do what you're told, this is just a recurrence of an older form of government where governors, kings of the Gentiles lorded it over people.

And to kind of, to the point of the idea of Christianity disappearing and civilizational collapse, John Robbins writing in an essay called The Religious Words of the 21st Century said, the West has been in collapse for more than a century.

The biblical theology that created Western civilization 500 years ago has all but disappeared in the West. And that's the reason for the collapse. Now he wrote that back in 2006. And if his words were true in 2006, which they were, they're even more true today.

That's actually one of my favorite essays from John Robbins. I'm gonna post that in the show notes. If you've never read The Religious Words of the 20th Century, I strongly recommend it to you. I love John Robbins' work.

I love all of his work. But that one to me is, I think, one of the really, if I had to pick out maybe a few of the really what I thought were his absolute best writings, I would certainly include that in it.

I mean, it's an exceptional essay. And if you haven't read it, please check it out. In a similar vein, John Robbins was writing in the foreword to Gordon Clark's A Christian View of Men and Things. And he made a very similar point.

He said this, quote, a Christian view of men and things presents the argument that the West is disappearing because Christianity, on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared from the West, end quote.

So again, here's that same idea, that Christianity created Western civilization, and as Christianity's vanished, Western civilization is vanished. And what do they say? I think there's that term, nature abhors a vacuum.

So you have this collapse of Christian civilization. So something's gonna rush in and take that place. Well, what you're seeing is just that old, natural arrogance coming back to people who are in positions of power.

Instead of having this Christ-like idea of government, of people in authority being servants, you have people coming back in who like to lord it over the people. People like, say, Nancy Pelosi, people such as Anthony Fauci, they love telling other people what to do.

But that's just man in his natural state. That's just the way, as people, we are naturally. And it's when we're regenerated, when we're brought into Christ, and we begin to understand the, we begin to look at the world through Christian lenses and not through the lens of natural man, that we begin to accept that idea of servant leadership.

But left to our own devices, you would never see this. I mean, the idea of government as a servant did not occur in a non-Christian setting. And there's a reason for that, because natural man does not accept those things.

That's the work of God. And John Robbins, and this is going back to his writing in the foreword of A Christian View of Men and Things, John Robbins said this. He said, the collapse of the West can be viewed as the West's fatal choosing of non-Christian philosophy and not Christ.

So, and this goes back probably at least well into the 19th century, where you began to see this rise of non-Christian philosophy and this rejection of scripture. And it's because you have this rise of non-Christian philosophy, and you have the West basically turning its back on Christ, that you have the return of this cancel culture, this old, this sort of older version where the kings of the Gentiles lorded over them.

Yeah, and we're getting back to that more and more. And this is why more and more you're seeing this sort of top-down, arrogant, listen to what I say, obey what I tell you, be quiet, and don't ask questions.

That's why you're seeing this more and more. It's amazing to me how much this has changed, even in just the last few years. You know, it's amazing how much more of this is evident in public life. And these were just a few examples here that I've thrown out for you in Fauci, and in Nancy Pelosi, and in the climate change folks, in some of the other examples that I had given.

Closing Thoughts, Support, and Subscription

So anyway, that's about all for today. Thanks very much for listening. I really do appreciate that. I really appreciate your supporting my work. I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna get this podcast posted on my blog.

That's luxlucid .me. So if you want to check it out there, you can go to the blog. When you're on the blog, I do have a donations link set up there. It's handled through Stripe. It's a WordPress blog.

It's in the plugin that they use, the donations link that they use is through a firm called Stripe. If you like this podcast, if you like the work that I do, I'd encourage you to consider supporting that work.

I mean, it takes some effort to put out these podcasts, takes an effort to write things. If you do have, if you are so moved, if you feel that that's something that you wanna support, I certainly would appreciate any support that you can give.

I'm also gonna be posting this to the Thorn Crown Ministries website. And I encourage you to check out Thorn Crown Ministries. Thorn Crown Ministries, it's an interesting website. It was put together by a couple of friends of mine, Tim Shaughnessy and Carlos Montillo.

They're the ones, I think, that kind of drove that whole thing. But there are a number of us who are contributors over there. Tim Kaufman has written and done podcasts there. Sean Garrity has written and has certainly written for them.

I believe he's been interviewed on some podcast. Hiram Diaz has done some work there. I think Ryan Denton has done some things there. And these are all scripturalists. These are people who have advocated or appreciated and read the works of Gordon Clark, of John Robbins.

So if you enjoy scripturalism, if you enjoy some of the work that I do, I think there's a good chance you'd enjoy the work of some of the other contributors to Thorn Crown Ministries. So I'd really encourage you to go check that website out as well.

Also, if you'd like to, you can subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts. They keep wanting to call it iTunes, but it's not iTunes anymore, it's Apple Podcasts. So if you'd like to subscribe to my podcast feed, you can do that through Apple Podcasts.

And I'm trying, Lord willing, I wanna be able to do one of these a week. I said I was gonna do that earlier this year, and I kind of fell off. I got busy with some things. But Lord willing, I'm going to be able to do some regular podcasting here.

And if you'd like to subscribe to my feed, you can do that through Apple Podcasts. Well, that about wraps it up for today. Thanks so much for your listening. I really do appreciate that. And until next time, may the spirit of truth guide you in all truth as you read and study God's word.

Good night, everybody.