Where Do We Go From Here? Staying Faithful in the Future

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We're still here, for now.

Obviously, we're all thinking, we all have to think about what we're saying and the context in which we're saying it these days.

The retribution for how you voted in the

United States right now is amazing. I mean, banks refusing to process transactions for people who are on the wrong side of history.

That wonderfully nebulous term that, of course, means nothing because you can't know what history is to be able to know who's going to be on the wrong side of it.

And of course, someone who's on the wrong side of it five years from now might be on the right side of it 50 or 100 years from now.

So it's a strange thing that people say. But anyway, I've never been good at running filters on this program or in doing what we're doing, but all of us are running them now.

We can't help but recognize that our livelihoods, our jobs, our ability to communicate.

Free speech is not only under full -scale assault, it has already been chilled tremendously.

That's a term, I don't know when I first heard it, but the chilling of free speech. Free speech has got frostbite right now.

Let me assure you of that. For example, I'm just looking at all the stuff that I have, again, in a program

I've mentioned before but I'm not going to mention anymore. Very useful for keeping stuff you see online.

But I'm not going to talk about what I'm using anymore for obvious reasons because I just don't want it all of a sudden to come up one day and you're no longer welcome to use our product despite the fact you pay for it.

Anyway, Harvard students petitioned to revoke degrees of Trump supporters.

So Trump -supporting alumni are now being pressured.

Of course, they're talking about Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Dan Crenshaw.

Harvard must revoke the degrees of alumni whose incendiary language and subversion of democratic process is rooted in the history of white supremacist voter suppression inside the violent insurrection on January 6th, the students demanded in their petition.

And we go, okay, these are students and we recognize that students tend to be less than grounded in history and things like that.

But our experience over the past number of decades, especially over the past number of years, has been that students get their way because the people who run the universities are less mature than the students are anymore.

That didn't used to be the way it was, but it is now. This whole mindset, if someone was openly a supporter of Donald Trump who is in business, now their businesses are supposed to be trashed, shut down, and that's all okay.

That kind of prejudicial activity is all okay. It can't go the other direction, but it can go one direction because of, well, again, the attack on language.

The elevation of one extremely confusing event with all sorts of people involved that I don't know that we're ever going to know the truth about, to be honest with you, especially after tomorrow.

That all of a sudden is the defining event of law and everything else, whereas everything that happened all summer, all the way up to the present time in riots, organized, clearly organized violence, utilization of social networking and everything else to organize violence, all that, that's perfectly fine.

That's free speech because it's on the right side. This is anybody who is even slightly familiar with the history of the rise of communist societies in Eastern Europe and around the world knows this is exactly how it's been done every place.

But who knows any of that anymore? You don't cover that at Harvard anymore, right? Because it would look way too much like your professor.

So you don't talk about things like that anymore. So I'm just sitting here as I'm looking at the materials that I have here, you know.

Bank threatens to cancel accounts if customers refuse to wear masks and all the rest is you just have to ask yourself the question, what do you talk about and how long will you have the freedom to talk about it?

The speed at which these things are happening is astonishing. Of course, it would be a wonderful blessing if Christians were united in how they are approaching these things.

They are not, obviously. I was just looking through the

Twitter feed of Dr. Russell Moore of the ERLC of the Southern Baptist Convention because over the past couple of days,

I have seen a number of passionate statements from Dr.

Moore about what happened on January 6th. He seems to know exactly what took place on January 6th, exactly who was involved, exactly who was not.

He seems to have more information than the United States government does. But he is passionate, very, very passionate about the prosecution.

I mean, he's law and order and walls and guns and everything. I was just wondering, is it just that people were in agreement with his previous tweets all through the summer?

When that elderly retired police officer was shot and killed, I believe it was in St.

Louis, early on in the rioting, certainly, because I mean, in the

Capitol situation, the only person who was shot and killed was one of the protesters who was in between two different groups of police.

I have still not seen anybody who can explain what was going on there. I haven't seen anyone who can explain why there are police officers standing around.

Maybe it's because they've all got masks on and they're so dizzy they can't tell who's who. I don't know. Lack of oxygen.

But there are cops standing around doing nothing. People just walking by, taking selfies.

And then when one person is killed in a horrible fashion, it's crossfire aimed toward other cops.

And I don't know. You don't either. But Dr. Moore does, because he has been passionate in calling for...

And so I went through his tweets and I don't know. Maybe they've all been removed or Twitter's doing something.

But I couldn't find anything where so many more people are dying.

And that officer, I'm sure, I'm sure that Dr. Moore posted numerous, you know, over the course of days, calls for the arrests and, you know, the whole nine yards in regards to that particular incident and other incidents that,

I mean, we went, has everyone forgotten that we went through an entire summer of outrageous violence?

Of the looting of stores right, left and center? Burning of buildings down? Nobody tried to burn the

Capitol down that I'm aware of. I think someone tried to steal a podium.

I think someone it's evidently when if this was a right thing and there weren't any leftists involved, obviously people in the right are extremely stupid because they didn't even get so much as a single big screen

TV out of any of it. Because I mean,

I lost track of how many people on the left got big screen TVs out of their expression of their free speech, out of,

I wonder how many between Walmart and Target. I wonder how many big screen

TVs they had to file insurance claims on across the

United States, just all over the place. Didn't seem to happen. People on the right, they're just not smart, they just don't take advantage of what they need to take advantage of,

I guess. In other words, it's quite obvious that there was a vast difference between the level of violence, burning of property, organization, all through the summer, for days and weeks and months on end, and a single incident on January 6th that is now being turned into the mechanism to overthrow everything, to change everything.

And here's Russell Moore, and he's right in the middle of it. It makes you go, huh, I wonder if he could be that undiscerning, or is this just the continuation of the trajectory he's been on all along?

And when will the Southern Baptist Convention ever wake up? Ever wake up?

I don't know. I don't know, because it's not just the SBC. But I had it this morning.

I mean, tomorrow, the next day, the next couple of weeks, it has been announced, we've known for months that the incoming regime intends to punish the outgoing perspectives and to establish themselves as the only party that will ever rule again in the

United States of America. They've announced how they're going to do that. They are going to create 11 million new voters almost instantly, all of whom will be

Democrats. If you saw this,

I don't know how serious it is, but it certainly fits with everything else. Serious discussion about disbanding the circuit courts and then re -instituting them with all

Biden appointees. That way you get rid of all of the conservative jurists and just put your stamp ideological judges in place.

That's why the first time the

Supreme Court steps in and slows, even tries to put the brakes on all of this, you're going to hear the screaming to pack the court.

They can do it. All they've got to do is use a nuclear option, get rid of the filibuster.

They can do whatever they want. They have full control of everything. You can't stop them. Our system wasn't designed to withstand this.

There you go. This is all coming our direction.

At the same time that there's mounting evidence of Chinese involvement with the

Biden family and money and all sorts of stuff like this, none of which will, you know, it'll be investigated over in some corner someplace, but you're not going to ever get anything much out of that.

So it's in the midst of all this that we find out yesterday that the new regime has tapped.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The medical expertise of the individual responsible for Pennsylvania's face planting debacle in their nursing homes with COVID -19 back in March, April of 2020.

To have a important position in the new regime.

And of course, this man claims to be, quote unquote, transgendered.

And so the picture began circulating. The immediate comments began circulating.

And of course, a Christian who looks at this man who is living a lie, he's living in rebellion against God's created decree.

Being a medical doctor, he knows the realities, the scientific realities.

And here's, by the way, I pointed this out and I want everyone to think about this. If this man, and he's an elderly man,

I believe, I better hold off on that. I forgot to look it up. But I know he's married to a woman.

And I think as children, it might be a grandfather. I'm not sure. If that's the case, I don't even know what to say.

But why don't you look that up, see if he's a grandfather. Anyway, if this individual, this man, started having chest pains, radiating into the arm, and was rushed to a medical facility, let me guarantee you something.

Let me guarantee you something. This man would make sure that the attending physicians and nurses were completely and totally aware that he is a biological male.

No matter how he is dressed, no matter what hormones he may be ingesting, and he'll tell them that too.

But he will tell them that he is a biological male because he's a doctor.

And so he knows that a possible heart attack situation will be treated by any meaningful medical sources based upon gender.

What drugs are used, and especially the dose of drugs to be used, vitally important.

And if he wants to live, he will make sure that the attending medical personnel know the truth, the physical reality of who and what he is.

Now, there will be further complications depending on how far he's gone in the mythical process called transitioning, what drugs he's taking, what hormones he's taking, that, by the way, in any situation, would greatly increase the possibilities of a myocardial infarction.

But the point is, he still lives in this world. And it's

God's world. And he has to deal with that reality. Yes, sir? Wife and two children.

And if he's 58, then those children probably have children as well. I mean, I don't know that.

But that's my age. And I've got four grandkids.

So there you go. I'm not going to dig into that.

But it would be, in my opinion, a horrible tragedy if he is. I think that when any man, but especially when a man who has married and had children becomes so self -absorbed so as to engage in this kind of behavior and come out as transgender and start pretending to be the opposite sex, that is one of the most selfish, self -centered,

I -could -care -less -about -my -kids -and -my -grandkids acts that I can ever think of in my life.

Ever think of in my life. Just amazing.

Absolutely amazing. So I think we may have commented on this individual in the past.

But what was amazing was I was directed to some tweets from Thabiti Anyabwili.

Now, Thabiti Anyabwili, the last I knew, was, I believe, a board member of TGC.

Last I knew. Last I knew. Only met once.

We spoke at a conference together for Sola Scriptura Ministries up in Toronto. Canada.

About 2008 -ish, I think. It's been a while. We were speaking on Islam and had a fine time together and all was well because that was 2008.

And a different world. Different world. And over the years, we have tracked the trajectory of Thabiti Anyabwili.

And I know that's not his given name. And it was, you know, African and had something to do with his

Muslim time and all the rest of that time. Decided to keep it. Whatever. Ron Johnson or something.

I don't know. Anyway. The trajectory has, over the past number of years, been startling to many of us.

He had written works that were, let's just put it this way, inconsistent with where he is today.

In the past. But he mentioned the many tweets, may have retweeted a particular one, as I recall.

Regarding the regime's choosing of the transgender individual. And he says,

I hold a traditional understanding of biblical sexual ethics. So I do not support transgender lifestyles as a

God -pleasing lifestyle. But that doesn't mean this person isn't qualified to be a doctor.

Or one of the nation's chief doctors. It means they need the gospel. And not to put it too bluntly, but how in the world can you support or overlook the gross immorality of President Trump and his near -complete incompetence, but commenced to whining about this person's sexual orientation despite their reputation for competence in their field?

Well, first of all, he doesn't have a reputation for competence in their field. He did in Pennsylvania's old folks' homes what was done in New York.

What competence? But notice, you have to bring

Trump in. Gotta bring Trump in. Gross immorality.

Well, no question about that. I remember in 2015, 2016,

I think I even posted the picture that was running around in those days regarding Trump in his office and the

Playboy cover that he had up and stuff like that. No question about that.

But how—I'm sorry, the woke—the group of woke individuals out there,

I'm struggling at this time as I see the result of your efforts in reversing protections for Christian doctors, in money flowing into Planned Parenthood, in the great strengthening of abortion, infanticide, the tremendous promotion of homosexuality, transgenderism.

Every kind of vile, sinful, rebellious thing on the planet is all of a sudden getting renewed life, and you all don't seem to even begin to understand the concept of a worldview.

You all used to speak at conferences about worldview, but now you don't get the idea of worldview.

You don't seem to understand that there is a consistency in the worldview that is being promoted by the people that you told people in your churches that they could support that will eventually lead to the closing down even of your churches, if left unchecked, if God is not merciful.

I just don't understand this level of naivete. And so Thabiti says,

I hold a traditional understanding of biblical sexual ethics. Well, isn't that nice?

That sounds like Joe Biden saying he's a Roman Catholic. I responded—I'm sorry,

I couldn't help it. I said, absolutely stunning. What happened to you, Thabiti?

Oh, I don't support that as a God -pleasing lifestyle, but he—can you still say he,

Thabiti? Because he never said that. He said this person. He jumped over the real issue.

This person isn't qualified to be a doctor. It means they need the gospel.

No, it means he needs the gospel. That's purposeful.

Thabiti's a smart guy. He's specifically avoiding getting in trouble in standing for the biblical understanding that this is a man.

He won't do it. That Thabiti Aniwili I met in 2008 would have. There's no question about that.

None. That's why I said, what happened to you? What is it about wokeism that eats the heart out of any type of evangelical commitment?

Oh, I don't support that as a God -pleasing lifestyle. How about saying it is an act of rank rebellion against God?

How's that? You say they need the gospel. That means they are in sin, right?

And this is a self -deceptive sin, is it not? But he—can you still say he,

Thabiti, is still qualified? Let me tell you something, sir. If this man was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, he would demand to be treated as a male.

You know why? Because he is. He needs medical attention that fits reality. Medicine choice dosage is gender -specific, and he knows it.

He is living a lie. But you can still pretend he is qualified to tell the rest of us about medical issues, including injecting 13 -year -old girls with testosterone and Lupron and cutting off their breasts because he thinks it is good and proper to do so as well?

What on earth happened to you? That's what we're all asking, not only about Thabiti Anyabili, but about the

RLC, about TGC. What happened to you people? How much of this will it take before you start realizing that all of your critical race theory was a bunch of bunk?

It was a lie. It has no biblical underpinnings.

Those shallow little Bible stories you've been telling, trying to cram

CRT into every corner of every Old Testament story you can find, will not hold up.

Will not hold up to examination. Will not hold up to what's coming. What happened to you all?

It is shocking. It is sad. Read an article.

I mentioned it to you. I don't know if any of you took the time to read it.

It's not a short article. And I've debated with myself as to whether I even want to talk about it, but I think it's important in light of where we are.

Well, what has been consuming my mind is answering the question that's been asked by so many people in the global church.

I'm not talking about just the United States. This is happening around the world. I have friends in South Africa.

I have friends in Germany. I have friends in Australia, New Zealand. Because of the internet and because our planet is circled by thousands of mechanical devices, anything that happens in one place is known almost instantly around the world.

That's why so many people are paying attention to elections here in the United States, and that's why so many people are pushing for world governance, though that's one of the most unwise things from a

Christian perspective you could ever think of. Well, from a biblical Christian perspective,

Christians who do not have a biblical anthropology will be sucked into the utopian panacean ideas, and that's what's happening.

That's what's going on. The founders of this country who have been betrayed and denied by this country, whether by a majority of people in this country who voted last time or not, we'll never know.

But the founder of this country fully understood that man is evil, that man will seek to promote his own self -interest and will gather power at the detriment of others.

So they designed a system, worked for a long time, they designed a system to diffuse those powers because of the danger that they knew that was inherent in the nature of man.

We have nations in the world today that have very clear desires to rule and reign in the lives of others.

The greatest danger to freedom and liberty in the world today is the

Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. And I believe firmly that the fingerprints of the

CCP are all over what's going to happen tomorrow in Washington. I think we have become, well, are we the eastern or western protectorate?

It depends on which direction you go around the globe. But I can assure you one thing, the outcome of January 5th and November was exactly what the

CCP wanted and desired and got. The CCP is an evil, evil governmental structure.

Unless, of course, the world, for many people today, the term evil is not relevant to governmental structures at all.

For many Christians, evil is only a private thing, it's not really a thing that's relevant to politics.

Politics is out there and it's neutral and everything's neutral in politics. And you just try to get people to vote a certain way and that's just how you do stuff.

The Chinese Communist Party has murdered millions of its own people.

Going back to Mao, the graveyards are full.

As a communist country, the state seeks to be

God, to function as God. There is a fundamental reality in our world and that is reflected in the words of scripture, blessed is the nation whose

God is the Lord, Yahweh. Every nation has a

God. Every communist nation has a God. The communist nation, God is the state.

The Chinese Communist Party persecutes, imprisons, tortures and executes minorities that will not simply repeat whatever it is they are told to repeat by the

CCP. We have talked on this program before and people say, you shouldn't be talking about stuff like this. Well, it's this worldview thing.

You say, yeah, you know, you have talked about social credit scores in China, but that seems somewhat innocuous.

Really? It's innocuous that a secular state would set up standards as to what is good and evil and would utilize technology to enforce behavioral standards upon the people, thought standards upon the people based upon what the state says is good and evil.

And since they say worshiping Jesus is evil, you can't see how it's system is here.

It has been dropped down on top of you. When your business can be materially impacted by not going along with the new narrative, by not agreeing with what the state says is good.

The state now says that transgenderism is good.

The state now says that it's a good thing for 13 year old girls to have their breasts cut off.

That's a good thing. Now that's morally good. And they will reward those who promote this, who agree with this and who repeat it.

They want to hear the people saying these things. And if you dare say otherwise, you will be punished.

The social credit score is here. It'll only become more and more and more obvious.

This is what totalitarianism is. It's what tyranny is. And you will either have the consistent, unchanging moral and ethical revelation found in God's law that Jesus honored and demonstrated to be truly

God's revelation for mankind by dying on the cross. God bless fundamentalism for standing up against liberalism.

But one thing that was lost in that movement was a high view of God's law.

It was lost. And the connection between that high view of God's law and the cross was lost.

You end up with the cross being a sentimental thing rather than not only the accomplishment of God's power, but the vindication of his law, the vindication of the goodness of that law, of the holiness of that law.

Jeremiah 31, I will write my law upon their hearts. Well, that's a whole different law. No, it's not. That's not what Jeremiah would, that's not how anyone would have understood

Jeremiah. They would have understood that this is the internalization of the fact that God's law represents

God's holiness, vindication of his holiness and his purposes in creation. There's no room for any of that within the communist system at all.

There can be no freedom for people to believe that. Chinese communism, certainly under Mao and now under Xi Jinping, requires utter capitulation of your mind to the state.

The state determines what is good, what is evil, what is right, what is wrong.

And as long as you will simply repeat what the state says to you, you can live a fairly benign, innocuous existence.

In fact, you probably can play your video games and just as long as you will be the servant of state, you'll get along just fine.

But there can be no room for freedom of thought, freedom of speech. There's no room for debate.

You are what you are. Oh, you can have competing sports teams.

You can debate over which football team is better, football over there being something different than it is here, obviously.

Sure, you can wear your team colors or something like that, but that doesn't impact the government.

That doesn't impact what is being taught to the children in schools. You may have seen that the early reign church, which has been so heavily persecuted by the

Chinese government, was raided once again. Why? Because they had a homeschool. They were training their children because they know what we need to know.

They're doing what we need to be doing and suffering for it. This is what tyranny and totalitarianism is all about.

And tyrannical totalitarian states have more tools available to them today than they have ever had before in history.

That is what I've been warning about. Yes, we can look back and we can look at how

Christians survived under Soviets and how Christians have survived under the Chinese in the past. But this is a new world.

Every time you see one of those SpaceX things going up in the sky, they're leaving stuff up there.

They don't even leave junk up there, thankfully. Watching them land their booster rockets back is just astonishing.

It's great. I'm a geek. I love that kind of stuff. But they're putting satellites up there. And whereas Christians used to be able to go hide someplace and have the

Lord's Supper and pray and maybe even sing quietly, that is not an option anymore. There isn't any place left.

I suppose if there are some mines somewhere, some underground places, and you make sure that you take, you leave everything, all your phones and your watches and everything that gives off a signal,

I'd have to leave my ring. Maybe, I suppose there might be some way of doing something like that.

But everybody can be watched now. Everybody. You get into your car.

If I get into my car, it's Sunday afternoon. And ironically, my wife was just messaging the family saying that the dividing line keeps breaking up.

Is she the only one having this problem? I'm sorry, dear. Huh? Rich says we're all fine here.

But if I get into my car on Sunday afternoon, you know what this thing does? It tells me how long it's going to take me to drive to church and gives me the address because it knows that's what

I do every Sunday afternoon. That's a little scary. Now, see, we've enjoyed that because it's helpful.

Because it'll also tell me if there's a blockage along the route that I normally take. But it knows what my route is.

It knows where I'm going. And it knows everybody else, too. And that's a problem when the state wants to control everything you say, think and do.

So all of that, sorry. Believe me, my mind has been going 1000 miles an hour for quite some time now.

Like I said, I wasn't even sure I was going to talk about this. But there's an article called

Our Souls Are Dead, How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp for Uyghurs.

This is from The Guardian. My daughter tells me it was a reprint.

It's January 12, 2021. Not long ago, obviously, but she said she had read it earlier.

And this is the story of a woman who went back to China.

She was in Golbahar, Hyderabad.

I'm sure I'm probably messing that up. But she was in France.

She had escaped China. Married, children, family.

Made the mistake of going back to China to sign some papers she was told she needed to be signed and was placed in a reeducation camp for Uyghur Muslims, because she's

Uyghur, for two years. It is the story of what she went through.

I have thought, by the way, in thinking about doing this, talking about this program, to say to parents,

I'm not sure this is a child -friendly program. Not because there's anything sexually explicit about it.

It's just frightening. It's frightening for adults. As I read the experiences that these people have, as I read the hours and hours and hours of indoctrination, yes, the beatings.

At one stage, she was chained to her bed for 20 days as punishment and wasn't told what for.

And then sent to this school. Remember, some brave soul, probably now departed this world.

Remember when some brave soul, about two, three years ago, three years ago, 2018, flew a drone close enough to a rail station to record

Uyghur Muslims, thousands of Uyghur Muslims being transported by the

Chinese communists. Remember that? Probably don't. Some of you do. Taken to these huge, massive places.

All you have, there are cameras everywhere.

You never have privacy. No mattresses, no furniture, no toilet paper, no sheets, no sink.

Just a wooden bed. If you call that a bed, slat, whatever.

The days were spent in classes. If you fell asleep, you'd be beaten.

If you collapsed, you'd be taken away and probably never seen again. You were instructed to be thankful.

I'm looking for 11 hours of daily teaching. Here it is.

At her signal, we all stood up as one. This greeting to the teacher kicked off 11 hours of daily teaching.

We recited a kind of pledge of allegiance to China. Thank you to our great country. Thank you to our party.

Thank you to our dear president, Xi Jinping. In the evening, a similar version ended the lesson.

I wish for my great country to develop and have a bright future. I wish for all ethnicities to form a single great nation.

I wish good health to President Xi Jinping. Long live President Xi Jinping.

This is what you would do. You're to be thankful, not to God, but to the state.

This type of torture would go on day and night.

Lack of sleep, proper food, exhaustion.

Every day, let me quote. Let's see. As days went by, fatigue set in like an old enemy.

I was exhausted and my firm resolve to resist was on permanent hold. I tried not to give in, but school went steamrolling on.

It rolled over our aching bodies. So this was brainwashing. Whole days spent repeating the same idiotic phrases.

That wasn't enough. We had to do an hour of extra study after dinner in the evening before going to bed.

We would review our endlessly repeated lessons one last time. Every Friday, we had an oral and written test. By turns, beneath the wary eye of the camp leaders, we would recite the communist stew we'd been served up.

In this way, our short -term memory became both our greatest ally and our worst enemy. It enabled us to absorb and regurgitate volumes of history and declarations of loyal citizenship so we could avoid the public humiliation dished out by the teacher.

But at the same time, it weakened our critical abilities. It took away the memories and thoughts that bind us to our life.

After a while, I could no longer picture clearly the faces of her husband and my daughters.

We were worked until we were nothing more than dumb animals. No one told us how long this would go on.

Time obviously becomes something you can't even keep up with.

In the transformation through education camps, life and death do not mean the same thing as they do elsewhere.

A hundred times over, I thought, when the footfalls of guards woke us in the night, that our time had come to be executed.

When a hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, another hand snatched away the tufts of hair that fell on my shoulders,

I shut my eyes, blurred with tears, thinking my end was near. That I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, drowning.

Death lurked in every corner. When the nurses grabbed my arm to, quote, vaccinate, end quote, me,

I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilizing us.

That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented, not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear, so slowly that no one would notice.

To catch that, they were vaccinated. I'm sure they kept them free of viruses.

They were being sterilized, chemically sterilized, so they couldn't have children anymore in the camps.

That's what communists do. The communist worldview has absolutely no moral foundation outside of stating that the state is right about all things and can never be corrected.

It's infallible. And so vaccination, there you go.

Why not sterilize them? If they're a problem, it's better for the state. And whatever is good for the state is what is good.

It's really just loving others, isn't it? Well, how can you say that?

Well, if they are, the Uyghurs are standing in the way of the progress of the state.

And the state is having to waste money, time, and effort building these huge facilities and re -educating all these people.

And so if the common good is the standard, and the common good can only be determined by the state, then it is good to vaccinate people and to sterilize them.

That's a good thing, right? Folks, they made these folks confess to crimes they had never committed.

They made them condemn their families for crimes they had never committed. God made our minds in such a way that we either lie to advance our own sinful desires, avoid the results of our actions.

But if we are forced to lie constantly against what we know to be the truth, we begin to break down as human beings.

In the last program, I gave you that Dalrymple quote, which is an excellent citation, an excellent quote, where he talks about how communist propaganda was not meant to convince, it was not meant to inform, it was meant to humiliate.

How the very name, and it still exists to this day, but the name of the primary

Soviet organ of communication was Pravda. Pravda, which means truth.

And everybody in the Soviet Union knew that Pravda was not

Pravda. So you're forced to live with a lie.

Live according to lies. Say what you know isn't true, because we tell you to.

It breaks you down. I have a video,

I'm not sure if it's still up. I ran across a video, I think Friday, called

The New Normal. Last time I saw it was still on YouTube. One of the best videos I've seen, best made videos, comes out of Britain, laying out what the

Great Reset is all about and what's behind all of this. And it lays out the same kind, you've got that guy, that grinning idiot, in the

WHO video, where he's smiling and the video is saying, by 2030, you will own nothing and you will be happy.

And there he's just, you know, and then they have a drone, didn't say Amazon, but they have a drone.

If you need anything, you'll rent it. And I read a story like this and I sit back and I go, um, you do realize what this means, right?

What do you call a person who has no personal property, who cannot work to better himself, who cannot save to pass on to his children or grandchildren, but who works completely for someone else, in this case, the state, and is dependent for everything upon that state.

That person is called a slave, not a citizen, a slave.

That's what a slave is. You work for somebody else and never, ever, ever forget there will always be the party.

There will always be the elite and they will always have luxury.

They will have all the world's goods they want. Xi Jinping sleeps in a comfortable bed.

He may have a, my pillow, never, ever, ever think that all that work you do for the great state isn't making somebody else very rich.

Just not you because you're the servant, you're the slave. This is not biblical economics.

My friends, the reason the scripture says thou shalt not steal is because God never designed the state to be our

God and he never designed work to enrich the lazy.

There's a reason why God's law is good. There really is. Okay, so I read this woman talking about how she starts to break down and if you read the article, just look up, our souls are dead.

It should come up. If you read the article, you cannot help but start thinking about what if I were there.

Oh, you're not a Uighur Muslim. No, but they have Christians in re -education camps, Orthodox Bible -believing

Christians just like you. The pastor of the early reign church that they have sentenced to nine years, not two years, nine years.

In one of his writings, and I need to, I want to collect them all as quickly as I can. One of his writings, the first thing he said, the first rules for persecution, never, ever stop meeting as the church.

Never, ever stop meeting as a church. He understands the necessity of it and they have suffered for it.

It makes you a sitting target, but they've kept doing it. You can't help but put yourself in those dormitories, standing for hours, people passing out around you because they can't stand any longer.

You can't help but start thinking about it yourself. Here's where it gets tough, folks.

This is where if you don't want children in the room, this is the time. What will you do when you are given the choice of signing on the dotted line, signing the confession, saying,

I will no longer say that. I will no longer say that marriage is between a man and a woman for life.

I will celebrate two men being married, two women being married.

I will call this person a woman, though that is clearly a man. Any four -year -old would be able to see it, but I will go along with the lie.

What if it's that, or you probably never see your wife again, probably never see your husband again.

Your children are taken from you. You never see your grandchildren. Oh, we can sit here all day long and talk about how brave we will be, but there's not a one of us outside of supernatural grace that could survive that.

Don't be a Peter. I'll never deny you. Three times, right?

Those of us who have not gone through it should be very, very hesitant to proclaim our vaunted strength and abilities, but we should not be hesitant to proclaim the vaunted strength and ability of Christ in us by his spirit, because there have been many believers who have stood firm.

There have been many believers who have compromised and given in.

As we've taught on the early church in the past, I've pointed out over and over again, this was the greatest issue that caused division in the early church, was when there was persecution and there was compromise.

What do you do after the persecution ends? And the people want to come back into the fellowship.

That tore the early church apart. Donatist controversy, innovation schisms, all because of that.

Fully understandable. No easy answers. You had people on the extreme end of both sides of how to handle that, but that aside, here's where my mind is right now.

How do you prepare for this? How do you prepare yourself if this is what you are called to do?

Now, this woman's not a Christian. She's a Uighur Muslim. Seems more like a secularist to me, but anyway, what about you as a

Christian? What about me as a Christian? You know,

I've always thought, you know, me and my wife were,

I'm getting older. She's not. I have to keep saying that, but that we would just do this one -sided getting older thing until probably

I would die first. The guy normally goes first. And man, her grandmothers lived to their late nineties.

So she's got really good genetics. So she'd go for a long while. And I've just always thought, you know, we'd be seeing the grandkids and we got started early enough.

Maybe even the great grandkids. That would be a blast. And we'd have our little house and, you know, my wife, my daughter's always saying that they need to put a

GPS tracker on me because they're afraid I'm going to someday get on a bike and go for a ride and forget where I am.

And then they can't find me. And they're gonna have to have a silver bike alert, something like that, which is possible.

You know, we've all had those little thoughts about what's coming down the road, or I'm just going to get run over by a truck on a bike ride.

That's a real possibility. Fast way to go. It doesn't really cross your mind to face isolation in a prison.

It doesn't cross your mind that your actions could result in your wife's imprisonment, or at least having her left to her own devices.

Now that is by the way, something that I am strongly recommending to all churches.

You need to have a plan. You need to have a plan. You need to have a worst case scenario plan.

So if your leaders are taken, who steps up and who takes care of the leader's families?

Who do they move in with? If they're elderly, who do they move in with? What do you do with their property unless the state's already taken it?

What's the best way to handle that? So many details. And we haven't thought about them before.

We need to think about them now. We need to think about them now. So on the personal level is just the personal reality that there are things that we can do to prepare ourselves individually that all have to do with a growth in grace, memorization of scripture, the spiritual disciplines is the only way you can survive that type of thing.

But here's the bigger picture. Here's the bigger question, the bigger question. And this is, I addressed this in a brief article on Theology Matters a few days ago.

If you want to see that my developing thought, there is a book in the works. Talked with a like -minded smaller publisher just yesterday.

There's a book in the works and I need to do it quickly because this is happening quickly. And I don't claim to be the only one.

I'm just simply saying we're coming at this out of the field of apologetics and what will be the greatest pressure placed upon believers in the future?

We, I remember in 2007,

I think, seven or eight, I went someplace

I won't mention where and recorded videos for satellite beaming into Iran.

Because the Iranian Christians when asked, what can Western Christians do for you? Their biggest answer was we need theology.

We need a foundation. We need something that we can give to our children to answer the objections to the

Christian faith. So apologetics doesn't stop being relevant just because you can't do debates anymore.

The debates take place on a much smaller scale, but that foundational information remains vital to the continuation of the church in whatever form it ends up having to take under severe persecution.

So here's what I'm thinking. And I, like I said, I addressed this. There is the escapist and the endurantist understanding.

So for some people, we don't have to think long -term. We don't have to think about my grandchildren or my great -grandchildren.

We don't have to think about a hundred years from now or 300 years from now. We're right at the end.

It's all going to burn up. And you just hold on as long as you can because it's all coming to an end right now.

That's the escapist view. The endurantist view is that we are going to endure periods of great darkness while the kingdom of Christ is built on this earth.

I am an endurantist because I'm a church historian. You say you should be an endurantist because of biblical argumentation.

That argument has been going on for a long, long time. But hear me out.

I know that there have been times in the history of the church where the future looked just as black and bleak as it does now, and sometimes even worse.

And if you developed your eschatology on the basis of how it looked then, no one would have planned for the continuation of the faith to this day.

You wouldn't be copying manuscripts. You wouldn't be building schools. You wouldn't be concerned about language.

You just let it all burn because, well, obviously it's about Christ about to return, right?

The reason we're told we don't know when that's ever going to be happening is because we're never told to just give up. We are called to be faithful in the proclamation of the gospel, who

Christ is, Lord of all, risen Savior, in whatever generation we're placed.

And that has meant there have been times when Christ has called his people to walk through dark, dark, dark valleys.

Dark valleys. So as a church historian, I can look back and I can go, real dark valley there.

Ooh, dark one there. That was a deep one there. That was a sort of short one, but it could have been. See, I can see that.

Anybody can. But the only person who can't see that they are in a valley of such and such depth and such and such length are the people that are in the valley at time.

And so if you look at where we are right now, the question for the

Endurantist who wants to be faithful to the command of Christ to pass the faith on to the next generations is how?

How? One of my favorite books, junior high, into high school,

God Smuggler, Brother Andrew, smuggling Bibles through the

Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe, because that Bible was the very light of God's truth, decayed the bones of communism.

Well, it's there's a reason why in so many dystopian novels.

History has been wiped out. Literature wiped out. Fahrenheit 451. The 2018 version,

HBO 2018 version. Scary because it's so new. When bad things are happening on the screen, there are thumbs up being voted by people who are watching on their phones.

It's like, yeah, kid, can you see that happening? Right? Exactly.

We did last summer. And right now, right now, if there was live video coverage of say, famous politicians being perp walked out because they've been kicked out of government for daring to defy the new regime.

Isn't that exactly what would be happening if it was being done live on Facebook? Would there not be hearts and thumbs ups and going?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is I mean, it was scary because of that.

The first 20 minutes of watching that video was like watching MSNBC. It just didn't have the COVID numbers on the side.

That was the only difference. Destroying literature, rewriting history.

It's part of every dystopian novel. And there's a tax to your history.

If you know your history, then you can judge the current state. The state has to control that history to be an absolute totalitarian dictatorship.

And that's what took place in the Soviet Union. That's what's taking place in China. And we see the beginnings of it taking place in our own country right now.

With censorship. With the we need to take the degrees away from those people.

Change history. And by the way, let me just point out the demand to honor people as transgender is a demand to change history.

It was not a woman who won those gold medals in the Olympics. It was a man.

I watched it. I know. And so to force me to call that man, and he was a manly man, a woman, is to change history.

Same thing with the medical doctor. It wasn't a woman who got those degrees.

It was a man. So should he even have those degrees today if he's not the same man that graduated?

Some question you might want to ask. Changing history. How do we communicate the faith to those next generations?

Will we be hiding Bibles and books and libraries in the future? I just bought a little

USB. Well, it's sort of like this, except this is the other.

No, that's a USB -C too. Okay. So very similar to this, even smaller. How many gigs is this one?

I can't see without too small to see. Anyways, many, many gigs.

I bought a little one at home. It's 256 gigabytes.

That's a lot of space. You can put a huge library on something like this.

An EMP could wipe this out, which is why if you're going to store stuff, store them in electromagnetic bags to try to protect them from that kind of stuff happening.

But it's sort of hard to find. Even today, it's sort of hard to find this kind of stuff.

Is that how we will be storing a lot of things in the future? It may be a combination.

Physical books, teeny tiny little things like this. But it's one thing to have the information.

It's another thing to focus our children's minds on the key central elements of the faith so that they can withstand this kind of experience in a re -education camp.

Give them foundational, fundamental realities, and all of it's going to come back to their recognition of themselves as the creatures of God in his world.

Even though they may be locked in a place they cannot see his world any longer. They know it's there.

We're his creatures. This could never evolve.

The processes, the design, the biomechanical and biochemical things going on,

God's fingerprints. They need to understand those foundational realities about the world around them and who they are, and they need to be grounded deeply in the reality that God has spoken.

He prophesied the coming of Christ. He prophesied his death, burial, and resurrection.

And there is an empty grave that has stood empty for 2 ,000 years.

And that every single one of those people who are persecuting them, who are telling them they must lie, they must believe lies, every one of those people will die and they cannot raise themselves from the dead.

And that a day is coming when every person will stand before the one that the father has chosen,

Jesus as Lord. Those foundational realities have to be made the essence of their everyday experience, cemented into the reality of who they are.

It's true for all of us. It's true for all of us. The broader and deeper that foundation can be, the better.

This is no longer an issue of just being able to survive going to the local school down the road.

Our faith is becoming really real all of a sudden, isn't it? Stuff that for years and years and years we have taken for granted.

All of a sudden, the very essence of life. I know for many an evangelical, such things as the gathered body, the freedom to hear preaching, the freedom to sing hymns together, and especially the ordinances of the church, commandments of Christ, have all of a sudden taken on a completely new meaning.

And that's not a bad thing. All of a sudden, being able to partake of the supper has a meaning it could not have had in 2019.

Oh, those who had already endured persecution, separation, imprisonment, they understood, they tried to tell us, now we all get it.

At least we should. We should. Every one of us is asking ourselves the question, will

I survive? Will I be one of those people who stands firm?

And I ask myself the same question, because a lot of people are going to be looking at what

I do. Not just the people in my church, but my church is looked at by people all over the place because of what we've said and done in the past.

Will they compromise? Will they give in? And I recognize that to speak to any of this is to preach to myself.

That's one of the reasons why I think a lot of my fellow ministers are finding it uncomfortable to address these issues, because you have to be talking to yourself.

You're preaching to yourself. And one of the things I've come to understand, we can talk all we want about how much we want to see

Christ's church standing spotless before the throne of God.

That's the imagery of the New Testament, the spotless bride. The fact of the matter is, most of us like our cars more.

Most of us like our houses more. Most of us like having that certain yummy food more because there's going to be a purification coming, but it's going to be costly.

And all those things I just mentioned are the very things it may cost us to be purified and for the church to be purified.

And in our more honest moments, and these moments make for honesty, in our more honest moments, we have to admit that very often our love is not in the right place.

Our love is not focused upon the right things. We say it, we know how to say the words, but days like this reveal what's really going on.

One other thing, I haven't been watching any of the, anything going on online right now, so I've been sort of focused upon other things.

But one of the things that I'm really, that I had not had, if you watch the

New Normal video, I've downloaded it. If it's still available out there, grab it while you can.

One of the things I had not really thought through are the implications of the fourth industrial revolution, where you basically create a useless class, where robots and mechanisms,

AI, does all the work. I mean, it literally is

Skynet -type style stuff, which is happening all around us. But we won't have personal transportation anymore.

And the left wants this. I mean, how many, you've already, we hear it, but it doesn't click, that California just said there can be no more fossil fuel cars by such and such a year.

And you're like, they can't do that. How's anybody supposed to travel? Right.

You see, if you can't, if you don't have your own vehicle, whether it's a full -size car or a little putt -putt, even a bicycle.

I mean, I can get a long ways on a bicycle. I did a lot. It's not going to be quite as easy to do as you get older.

But hey, if you don't have that level of personal autonomy, they're saying, oh, no, no, no, no.

You'll just, you'll just, if you need to go someplace, and you, you get the Uber. Did anybody else watch?

Whoa. Hello. There we go. Did anyone else watch Minority Report?

Now, Minority Report was fascinating for a lot of reasons. Pre -crime, the whole nine yards.

Fascinating. That guy's great actor, but he's nuttier than a fruitcake.

Anyway, but this is the thing that for some reason, this stuck with me.

And now it's coming back up as I watch the new normal video. Remember how transportation worked?

You get into these things and they take you places. You're not driving it. And so if someone decides that you're going to go someplace else, that's where you're going to go.

Unless like Tom Cruise, you can bust out of it and jump from one to another or whatever else it might be.

But the point is somebody else gets to determine where that thing's going.

And if you can't go to church, how are you going to get there?

Our churches become extremely local, extremely local, as in within walking distance local, which by the way, walking distance is farther than you might think.

We don't generally walk all that far, but Europeans do. You go to Europe, you discover you can walk a fair distance.

But still, once, because the argument is with all these self -driving cars and AI, they're getting better and better and better and better.

And eventually they'll be so much better than human drivers that human drivers will not be allowed because they stink.

The AI cars can pass each other within a couple of inches and do it safely.

We can't. And so you will lose your ability to travel just as we're losing our ability to travel right now, but for other reasons, for other claimed reasons.

Anyways, so many things to think about.

That's going to impact how churches function and how churches gather and everything.

Everything is changing at a speed that is mind -numbing, mind -numbing.

And some of you are sitting there right now, I just wish you wouldn't talk about this stuff. Well, I'm sorry. Um, what

I want to do is in the years that I have left, and I don't know that I have years left of freedom to write, research, speak.

I think my later years will be challenging because you're trying to find ways of getting an unpopular message out past all of the censorship and repression and suppression of the gospel.

But what we can do is we can really address those foundational apologetics issues in grounding people in the foundational reality of God's revelation, his truth, the gospel, and in history, real history, the history that used to be done where your primary concern was to know what really happened, not changing history so it sounds like the state's always been right.

That's going to become more and more of a challenge. That's going to become more and more of a challenge. It really is.

And if there are some of you going into ministry out there and you're asking the question, what about us?

I've spoken to a lot of young men who have a desire to be doing those things and I've said, well, well, the

Lord can sustain you, but he's chosen a really unique time for you to be preparing because to be honest with you,

I've had it easy. We have had it easy.

And that easy time is passing, has passed. It's passed. Let's just be honest.

It's passed. It's passed. So, hey, that wasn't light, was it?

No, it wasn't. It's not time for lightness. There's other times for lightness,

I guess, but on the last day before a regime is installed in a militarized capital where all of a sudden guns and walls work.

That's funny how that worked. I thought those things didn't work, but now they're everywhere. And you're left going, honestly, you're just honestly left.

Did you see, Rich, what they've done where the people normally stand, they've filled with,

I don't know how many tens of thousands of American flags, little American flags, because they're not gonna allow anybody to be there.

And they are polarizing the military so that you have to pass a certain political sniff test to be involved.

You have to be on the right side. You've already got ideological political tests for the armed forces.

And so I look at this and I go, okay, yeah,

I've seen smaller versions in totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, places like that.

Yeah. Uh -huh. But the one that comes to mind, I'll be honest with you, is

Emperor Palpatine. That's what they should have.

They shouldn't have the star -spangled banner. They should have the emperor's theme. And somewhere

Padme, someone's really smart, they'd have a speaker hidden away someplace.

And then right at the right time, Padme's voice comes out. This is how democracy dies to wild applause.

I think that's what it was. This is how democracy dies to wild applause. That would be perfect because that's what's happening.

It's like, wow, who saw that? Well, anyway, we press on.

We recognize secular totalitarianism in God's world is an aberration and a judgment.

God did not make us to live in such a fashion. And God will deliver us from it in his time for his purposes.

And he only does so in one way, lie of the empty tomb, proclamation lordship of Christ.

So we press on. We will see you, Lord willing, on Thursday in a changed world.