119. The History of Christian Optimism (Interview with George Grant) | A Practical Postmillennialism

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You know, in the Olivet Discourse, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew chapters 24 and 25,

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Jesus attempts to calm his disciples' speculative fears.

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And he tries to show them that pessimism is not consistent with faith in the kingdom.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 119, my interview with Dr.

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George Grant. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

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We have a special episode today where we're talking to an expert in history,

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Dr. George Grant. I'm so excited to have this conversation because a friend of mine,

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Pastor Harold Guptill, and Tri -City Church in New Hampshire, you should check out that church, they're great.

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He was telling me about his friend, he was telling me about this man who had come and done conferences. I started reading his work, and I was so impressed, and I just sent him an email and said, hey, brother,

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I would love for you to come and help us understand how God in history has led his church to believe the gospel and believe in the power of God and believe that the kingdom is going to win, and this is not just some pie -in -the -sky theology that we've made up on the fly.

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So I'm encouraged and excited that we're going to have this conversation today. I hope you are. I hope anyone who's tuning in, please share this episode.

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Also go check out the things that Pastor George Grant is working on. This is going to be great.

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So with that introduction, brother, thank you for being on the show. Oh, it is my delight. I am so glad we were able to work out the schedule.

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We had a hard time trying to get the schedules to align, but here we are.

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Here we are, to the glory of God. Now I'm familiar with a little bit of your work.

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I'm new in some ways. I didn't become a Presbyterian until three years ago.

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I was a Reformed Baptist before that, joined the CREC, and I'm just now coming into new authors that I've been reading, and I've been really enjoying it.

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I read your book called Killer Angel, which is a story of sort of Margaret Sanger's history, her upbringing, the eugenics background, and just the depravity that is infected in that story.

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It's a gut -wrenching read, but I think it's an important read, so I'm glad you wrote that. You're a professional historian.

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You are also a pastor. Give us some more information. Who is George Grant? What have you been working on?

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Well, I am a pastor, first and foremost, and have served here in Franklin, Tennessee for a little more than 30 years, and so that's my primary calling.

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History is an avocation. I love it. I've helped to start a number of schools, both here in the

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United States and around the world, and the area that I have always taught at the high school level, the college level, the seminary level, has to do with some aspect of historical analysis.

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It's a great joy for me. I've written a number of books and have been heavily involved in the pro -life movement, thus the book

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Killer Angel, and five or six other pro -life books. I've written biographies of various heroes of the faith in the past, edited a series where Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins and a whole host of other

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CREC guys contributed to that series, volumes of their various heroes.

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So it's been a great joy. The Lord has allowed me to pursue my passions, so it's been great.

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Oh, that's incredible. It's always good when you're in the will of the Lord and you're doing what you already enjoy.

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It's a glorious thing. Amen. Amen. What got you interested in history, just as an initial question?

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I grew up in a very difficult, troubled home, and I found an outlet in books.

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As a kid, I discovered these youth biographies of great heroes, many of them by the author

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Augusta Stevenson. Then I graduated from Augusta Stevenson to G .A.

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Hinty and just started reading. I just became fascinated by the fact that there are so many great stories out there, and they're true.

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So that became a passion of mine. My father served in World War II, and his great hero was

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Winston Churchill. I remember the day that Churchill died,

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I came home from school that day, and my father was home. He was never at home when

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I came home from school. He was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper in front of his face, and I came in, and I was startled.

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I said, Dad, why are you here? He lowered the newspaper, and he said,

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The greatest man in the world has died. He was crying. I had never seen my father cry before.

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Then he raised the newspaper and continued to read. I thought, I think

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I know who Winston Churchill is, but I need to find out. So I did a deep dive into World War II and not just Churchill, but the whole panoply of issues.

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That was really sort of my booster shot. So I'd already had an interest in history, but that then became a propelling sort of factor for me.

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In some ways, I can even imagine studying those topics would help you get to know your father and know the things that were passionate to him.

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I can't help but notice the parallel of studying church history has helped me get to know our heavenly

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Father. It's one of the neglected disciplines, unfortunately.

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I think there's, and you can speak to this probably better than I can, but it seems to me that there's a pretty terrible, woeful ignorance of church history in modern evangelicalism.

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So how did you transition then from World War II history, there's fascinating stuff, to having a love for the history of God's people from the close of the book of Acts until today?

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Well, obviously the most critical factor was my redemption. I came to Christ as a sophomore in high school and immediately began to explore the faith.

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I was not raised in a Christian home. So the day after this big crusade that was at my high school football stadium,

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I knew that there was a little Pentecostal bookstore right around the corner from my home.

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So I decided, okay, I've made this commitment to Christ. I don't have a Bible. I don't even know what this means.

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And so I went to this little Pentecostal bookstore and decided, okay,

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I'm going to buy a Bible and I'm going to buy a couple of books. And I walked in. At the time, I was living on my own.

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My coach had kind of removed me from my home, thinking that it was a troublesome situation, and I was living in his garage apartment.

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So I was pretty much on my own from the age of 15. And so naturally,

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I'm very budget -minded, and I made a beeline straight to the sale table. I found a

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Bible, and apparently somebody at this Pentecostal bookstore had made a terrible mistake.

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They bought a bunch of books from Banner of Truth, and they're piled up on this table, and they were cheap.

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And I thought, okay, I'm just going to buy some of these. Of course, I have no idea what

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I'm getting, so I'm kind of perusing. And I basically bought books because I liked their covers, and no other context.

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So I bought one book called The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter. I bought another book called

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The Soul Winner by Charles Haddon Spurgeon. And then there was this big, fat, hardback book that was being sold for just $4, and it was a commentary from the

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Geneva Commentary Series on judges. And I thought, well,

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I'm interested in law, and I don't know much about judges.

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I had no idea that it was a Bible book, so I bought that. So those are the first three books.

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That and an RSV Bible were the first things that I bought.

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And as I plunged into these books, first,

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I realized, oh, these guys have been dead for more than 200 years. And then secondly, this is rich and fast.

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This is better writing and better thinking and deeper and profounder insights than I've run across anywhere else.

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That sort of was what hit the accelerator pedal, and I was off and running at that.

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So one of the things that Spurgeon really impressed upon me was the reality that the gospel is comprehensively true and trustworthy, and therefore we can have great, great hope, even in dark and dismal times.

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Now, at that time, Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth were a big deal.

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And so I actually went ahead and read those, you know,

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The Late Great Planet Earth and There's a New World Coming and all of those initial books from Hal Lindsay.

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And the thing that was striking to me is that it didn't seem that his pessimism matched the optimism that I saw in Richard Baxter and Charles Haddon Spurgeon and a whole host of others.

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That began my wrestling with the reality that the

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Lord has given us great surety that his triumph is something that we can rest and rely upon at all times, in all ways.

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I learned from Spurgeon that there really is just one story, one central story in the whole

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Old Testament. The whole Bible is about one thing, the pattern of creation, fall, redemption, and the restoration of every broken thing.

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That runs all through the Old and the New Testaments. The other thing that I discovered was that while people like Hal Lindsay were saying, read the

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Bible, you know, in one hand, the newspaper in the other, and then, you know, you're going to be able to make a good analysis of what you're reading in both.

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And I learned from Spurgeon that actually the Bible is the

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Bible's best commentary. BD And if I want to understand, say, something complicated like the book of Revelation, what

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I really need to do is I need to understand the book of Exodus and the book of Leviticus.

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I need to understand the whole of God's work of redemption.

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So that began this dive into biblical optimism.

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And I started to look through history to see, is this something that comports with the heroes of the faith?

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And lo and behold, it's the predominant view throughout all of history.

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God's people understood the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it, for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.

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One of Augustine's favorite passages is that great declaration in the book of Revelation where the whole of the heavenlies erupts with the declaration, the kingdoms of this world are the kingdoms of our

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God and of his Christ. So I'm growing up in the

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Nixon years and the Carter years, and pessimism abounds at every turn culturally.

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But I'm sitting there reading the scriptures and I'm going, if this is true, then we can have great confidence and glorious hope because the gospel shall prevail, period.

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CBT I was just reading in Hebrews 12 this morning, and I was doing an episode on the book of Hebrews, so I'm dating our episode right now.

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But I was so impressed that when Jesus says that he's going to shake the world and only that which is unshakable remains, and that the kingdom of Christ is the unshakable thing,

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I was thinking to myself, why did we lose this optimism? The world is

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God's sieve, and all of the sand and dirt and muck is going to fall out of it, and only the things that are his are going to remain, which means that the sum total of history is heading towards his kingdom being the only thing left.

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CBT Amen. You know, in the Olivet Discourse recorded in the

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Gospel of Matthew chapters 24 and 25, Jesus attempts to calm his disciples' speculative fears.

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And he tries to show them that pessimism is not consistent with faith in the kingdom.

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And all through the Olivet Discourse, he's laying out this pattern.

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Following his prediction that the temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed, his disciples ask him a whole series of questions.

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When will these things be? What will be the sign of your coming? And what will be the sign of the end of this age?

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And Jesus responds by telling them that they had nothing to fear,

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Matthew 24, verse 6. They were instead to be on guard against those who would unduly alarm and deceive them,

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Matthew 24, verse 4. In spite of a spate of wars and rumors of wars, in spite of pestilences and earthquakes and tribulations, they were to be assured, he said, that the end was not yet in sight.

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In fact, he said that these were the signs of the beginning, not of the end, the birth pangs.

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Now, everybody knows that birth pangs are not the end. CBT Right. They're not even the beginning of the end.

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They're the beginning of the beginning. WS So instead of focusing on these subjective and misleading signs of the times, these circumstances,

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Jesus directed their attention to the great task of preaching the gospel to all nations, caring for the despised, the rejected, and the unloved, and the unlovely, with the power of the gospel.

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CBT And just to add this, because it's such a phenomenal point that you're making, the birth pangs are the beginning of the beginning.

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At the end of that, you get a baby. CBT So the way that I tend to think about it is, that 40 years there in the first century was the 40 weeks of pregnancy.

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At the end, you get a baby church, a church with no temple now to rival it, no priesthood.

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The priesthood is Jesus, the temple is Christ and his people, and throughout church history, you have that baby growing up into a mature bride, ready to enter into the marriage with her bridegroom.

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So we should expect, just as a baby grows up, that the church is going to keep growing up until she's fully formed.

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WS Right. CBT Yeah. There's this great story. It's the story of Y1K.

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Just before the year 1000, things were rather dark and dismal in the world of Christendom.

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There were wars and rumors of wars, there were pestilences, there have been plagues.

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By this time, Islam is on the march. North Africa has been lost.

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Virtually all of the Iberian Peninsula has been lost. And there are threatenings now, all the way to the

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Anatolian plain, and the great civilization of Byzantium was under siege.

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So pessimism abounded. There were sages and prophets who came and did charts and graphs and demonstrated that the end was near.

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And of course, it made a lot of sense to people. We're coming close to the year 1000.

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Perhaps the end is then. The Pope even declared that the end would come at midnight on January 1st, the year 1000.

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WS Wow. So the faithful began to do things like lords and landlords were selling their properties, getting rid of all of their goods.

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Some of the greatest nobles, kings and princes gathered in old St. Peter's, and they waited for the end.

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There was this solemn mass and a long procession with the incense and the cries of the faithful.

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Come, Lord Jesus, come. And when it was almost midnight, the bells of old

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St. Peter's began to toll. And they told right up to the moment of midnight,

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January 1st, the year 1000. Everyone held their breath and nothing happened.

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All too often, that's the story. We look at our circumstances and we think these circumstances dictate where we are in God's providential flow of redemption and restoration.

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And the truth is, the wise have always said we're not governed by circumstances.

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We're governed by the eternal decrees of a providential covenant -keeping

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God who will fulfill his promises, who has fulfilled his promises, who always fulfills his promises, and the gospel promises shall prevail.

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TB Amen. Oh, that's so good. And it's clear to me in your life, you've been taken captive by, in a good way, these two ideas, these powerful ideas that, number one,

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God is going to accomplish the things that he said he's going to accomplish, and that should give us great hope and optimism.

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Fear is not a Christian virtue. Pessimism is not a Christian point of character.

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So that idea. And then the idea that these things will work out in history, which if you're like the

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Robert Frost poem, Two Roads Diverge in a Yellow Wood, we can travel on both here, and we will.

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Those two roads are the post -millennial hope and history. And I love that these two views are the views that have captured you, because I'd now like for us to kind of work our way through church history.

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We've seen this in the Bible. How has the church viewed the end times? There has been moments where they've huddled together and really missed it, swing and a miss, and they had to figure out what to do after they sold all their property.

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I've never heard that story. That is fascinating. But what about this view we're talking about, post -millennialism?

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Isn't this something that a few of us have invented? Is it a new thing? Is it certainly the minority?

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And in our world right now, it feels like it has no credibility because it has so few adherents.

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Maybe we can work our way through history and sort of dispel those myths. Yeah, so eschatological views have been varied all throughout church history.

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There have been people who have held to various views. Dispensationalism is very much a modern phenomenon.

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It really is 19th and 20th and 21st century.

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But all of the other views, a historist view, a synchronous view, Achilles view, a preterist view, or to use the more popular terminology, historical premills, pessimistic omils, optimistic omils, and optimistic postmills.

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There are partial preterists and full preterists. There are various things. And the truth is, is that the

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Bible is not laid out like a systematic theology where you can just kind of turn to the page on eschatology and have direct instructions.

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What we have is biblical theology. And so those who have tried to divine their doctrine of last things entirely from Ezekiel, Daniel, and the book of Revelation will inevitably go awry.

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And there have been those throughout church history. But predominantly, eschatology has been a subcategory of the larger category, the gospel restoration of every broken thing.

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Yeah. As a result, historical premillennialism, optimistic amillennialism, and optimistic postmillennialism are the predominant views throughout all of history.

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Whether we're talking about Augustine or Origen or moving forward to Abraham Kuyper, Cornelius Van Til, B .B.

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Warfield, Jonathan Edwards, these are the people who have wrestled with the whole story of Scripture and arrived at this conclusion.

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We may not know the exact timetable. We're warned against trying to divine a timetable.

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CB. Right. But this we do know,

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Christ prevails. The gospel prevails.

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So in the patristic age, virtually all of the early patristic fathers, all the way from Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, the

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Cappadocian fathers. This is late 1st, 2nd, 3rd century, roughly, right? 2nd, 3rd, and into the 4th century.

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All the way up through Athanasius and Augustine, they were universally either historic premill and very optimistic or some form of optimistic amill or postmill.

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Those were the eschatological views. When we move in deep into the medieval age, you start to see a splintering of those who were much more mystical and then those who were much more academic scholastic.

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JS Before we go to Middle Ages, I'm fascinated. I've grown up in a dispensational world like you.

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I read Left Behind, was the first Christian book I've ever read. I can't even conceive of an optimistic premillennial view.

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I hear you that the uniform view of the early church was optimism, which is incredible.

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There weren't doom and gloomers and pessimistic types. What is an optimistic premillennial view?

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How did they work that out? WB Well, basically, it looks exactly like optimistic amillennialism, except that they believe that there is a moment where Christ comes to make all things right.

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So there's no rapture. There's no seven dispensations, none of that kind of stuff.

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But there is this view. Francis Schaeffer held to a historic premill view.

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There are— JS Kind of like a golden age of premillennialism. WB Yeah.

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Yeah. So the idea of historic premills is that history proceeds along in the same way that Jesus describes the development of history in the

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Gospel of Matthew, where he says, an enemy comes and he sows tares in the field of wheat.

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And the disciples come and they say—or the servants come and they say, you know, we've got weeds.

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Should we pull the weeds out? And Jesus says—or the Master says, no, let them grow up together.

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History for a historic premill is tares and wheat growing up together.

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You have tare maturation, you have wheat maturation, they mature together. And then at some point, the

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Master calls for the harvest. And the harvest presages this millennial reign of Christ on the earth.

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WB In some ways, someone like David Chilton explains that the historic premills simply misunderstand the idea of the new heavens and the new earth.

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JS Yeah. WB But here's the bottom line.

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The idea of a pessimism about culture, a pessimism about the future, a pessimism about the world in which we live was entirely alien all the way back to the patristic age and really into the medieval age until you get deep into the medieval age.

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And so you have this pessimistic period from, say, the end of the 9th century all the way to the beginning of the 11th century.

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Then, because all of the predictions proved to be false and the end didn't come and things actually got better, pestilences disappeared, people were healthy, cities were beginning to thrive.

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The 11th and 12th centuries were halcyon days for Christendom. This is the time of Gregory Hildebrandt and of Anselm of Canterbury and the beginning of presuppositional apologetics.

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And I mean, this is a glory day. In fact, the

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Hildebrandtine renewals, sometimes in history books called the cleansing of the papacy, was really the first true reformation.

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It was a return to justification by faith and by faith alone.

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It was the beginning of presuppositional apologetics, beginning with the scriptures and moving to circumstance rather than starting with circumstance and moving to the scriptures.

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It was a glory day. And during that time, optimistic amillennialism and postmillennialism predominated.

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So Anselm, Alcuin, Hildebrandt, all of them, all except perhaps

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Amalard were optimistic. Then you have that sort of mysticism.

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Well, one more question. I need to keep jumping. I just want to distinguish this. What would you say?

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I've jokingly said that optimistic amillennialism is in the stage of grief called denial.

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Not yet confident enough to be postmill, but it's coming. I know that's silly.

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How would you distinguish that middle age optimistic amillennialism versus postmillennialism?

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Was it the extent to which the kingdom has physical impact on earth?

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Would that be the distinction? Yes. Okay. That the restoration of every broken thing does not occur until the consummation of all things in Christ.

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So the people that cling to an amillennial and yet are optimistic viewpoint basically are fearful of a triumphalistic mentality.

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And it's a good warning because the tares and the wheat do grow up together.

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We have tare maturation. Wickedness has never been as wicked, but righteousness has never been as righteous and as powerful.

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That tare and wheat maturation together is a kind of reminder to those of us who are postmill to not blow the trumpet of triumphalism, but rather to blow the trumpet of Christ's triumph and reign.

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Amen. So when we get to the 13th century, which is really the glory days of medievalism, we start to see mysticism and the ideas of the

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Renaissance starting to infiltrate the church. So we have Aquinas, and we have

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Aquinas building a theology more on Aristotle than on the

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Scriptures. And that's where we start to see the erosion of a lot of the optimism.

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It's also the beginning of what will be a terrible time of trial.

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14th century is the time of the Black Death. It's the time of the Hundred Years' War. It's the time of the

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Hanseatic League. It's the time of the Babylonian captivity of the church, where there are three or four rival popes vying for the allegiance of 10 or 12 rival kingdoms.

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You have Tamerlane's assault on the east.

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You have Islam's assault on the south. So it's a terrible, terrible time.

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And once again, Christians start to resort to woe -is -me pessimism.

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And there's plenty of good reason for woe -is -me pessimism. But at the same time that we have all of this woe -is -me pessimism, we have in Prague, Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus.

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In Oxford, you've got Wycliffe, John Wycliffe. In the

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Netherlands, you've got Gerhard de Grote. And each one of them starts a renewal movement that in 150 years will give rise to the

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Reformation. Amen. And all of the Reformers had been influenced by Wycliffe, Hus, and Grote.

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Grote started the Brethren of Common Life schools. Well, Martin Luther went to a Brethren of Common Life school.

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John Calvin went to a Brethren of Common Life school. Ulrich Zwingli went to a Brethren of Common Life school.

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Erasmus went to a Brethren of Common Life school. Beza, they were trained up.

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A movement that started in the worst of times, 150 years earlier, gave rise to this glorious magisterial

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Reformation. And all of the magisterial Reformers, all of them were optimistic about the future.

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They believed the gospel. Simple as that. It sounds like, and maybe

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I don't want to typecast this too neatly because history is only neat if you zoom out far enough, but it sounds like that the church has went through sort of 500 -year cycles where the downfall of the

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Roman Empire and then Christendom reviving out of that, and then moving on to the 1000s, and then this collapse that happens where they think that the end is coming, and then a rebuilding that goes further, sort of like an accordion.

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It extends out, and then it collapses, and then it extends out a little further, and then it collapses, all the way to the

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Reformation where you have this beautiful revival of biblical truth, right?

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Yeah, I think a lot of this, it's not that this is a timed event.

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It's not that these 500 -year cycles are set in stone. It's more along the lines of what

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Cotton Mather talks about in his Magnalia Christi Americana, this great history of the work of the gospel in the

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American colonies, and that is that when the church grows, prospers like any of the rest of us, we become overconfident, we become foolish, we become complacent, and we think all is well with the world, and that's when the trouble starts.

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So, in some ways, the most glorious flowerings of Western civilization have led to a season of prosperity and complacency that then brought about a downfall.

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Yeah, that's good. Pride cometh before the fall. It reminds us a lot of where we're at in our current moment.

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Absolutely, no doubt. The church has never been richer. The church has never been more effective in proclaiming its truth through all sorts of digital and broadcast media.

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The church has never had things like the megachurch movements that we have today.

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Right. Or podcasts like you and I right now. Yeah, exactly. So this is an incredible season, but this incredible season has lulled us to sleep.

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As Keith Green used to say, we've fallen asleep in the light.

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Wow, that's powerful. That's good. Well, let's start now. Let's go back to Reformation because I'm fascinated.

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All of the Reformers you said were optimistic. There wasn't really a single one of them that had this sort of doom and gloom theology.

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They did have some interesting takes on the Pope and the papacy and all of that. I would say we moved from Reformation to probably

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Puritan England and Scotland and how those things took hold there. Continental Reform that's happening in the mainland of Europe.

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What were their views? Well, again, there's a very consistent perspective of optimism, and it takes various forms.

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It's not all post mill, but it is very, very optimistic that Christ's gospel will prevail.

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It's really interesting, though. In times of war and revolution, you wind up having these peculiar offshoots of radicals.

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So for instance, during the Civil War, which was the heyday of the

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Puritans in many ways under Cromwell, though they never had a majority, they were the most powerful force in English and in the

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North, in Scotland, the Covenanters. They were the most powerful force in the culture.

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But at the same time, there was this sort of sidelight of extreme radicals, the

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Third Kingdom movement, which was sowing the seeds of what would become pessimistic dispensationalism.

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Pessimistic dispensationalism doesn't really take hold until the 19th century with Darby and others, but you start to see the seeds of it.

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There becomes a fascination with the Jews, particularly evangelization of the

40:44

Jews among the optimists, but also the beginning of a look at the Jews as sort of another category of God's people.

40:56

That's another seed that is sown during this time of revolution and disruption.

41:05

So you start to see some of that during the time of Cromwell, and it just really begins to grow over the next 100 years or so.

41:18

Interesting. The Puritans were mostly post -Mill, but definitely optimistic in their view of -

41:27

Yeah, they were mostly post -Mill. One of the things that happened with the Puritan movement is that after Cromwell, you have the

41:38

Great Ejection, and the Puritans are persecuted, they're hounded.

41:44

People like John Bunyan are held in prison for 12 years simply for preaching the gospel without a license.

41:52

And at the same time, Scotland is going through its clearances, and both under the last two

42:03

Stuarts and then the Hanoverians, the Scots are crushed. And the result is that tens of thousands of Puritans and Covenanters leave

42:16

Scotland and England, and they come to America. So many of those very optimistic, visionary, post -Mill

42:29

Puritan proclaimers of the gospel, they depart.

42:34

Right. And that leaves room for some of the splinter groups to begin to have a new level of influence.

42:45

Oh, interesting, because I think about Winthrop, and I think about some of those guys like City on a

42:53

Hill, America is going to be this light to the nations. It's so optimistic and so post -Mill.

42:59

I've considered that and how that totally affected the direction of America.

43:05

I hadn't considered the vacuum that it must have left in England. That is fascinating. Yeah, yeah.

43:11

One of the things that's really a fascinating thing to do is in the

43:19

Netherlands, the university city of Leiden is where the pilgrims first went.

43:28

They went to Leiden, and there's actually a neighborhood in central

43:33

Leiden that to this day is marked by all of these English names, places, and institutions.

43:44

You go to right around Pijterskerk, and there's an

43:50

English pub that is continuing on to this day. There's the Pilgrim Museum.

43:56

All of the streets are named for Robinson and all of these great heroes of the faith.

44:04

And you start to realize it was a handful of people. No more than 140 people were in Leiden at any one time among the pilgrims.

44:17

And yet the mark that they made because they believed that the gospel was renewing all things, they were only there for a few years, but the city to this day is marked by the pilgrims.

44:33

And their presence there, it's quite remarkable. Would you say that that sort of optimism and faith, because the opposite of doubt is faith, the opposite of fear is hope, that that is contagious?

44:50

That they were so different than what the others in that city had seen, that they left a mark that is instructive for us as Christians today, that we should consider, how do we impact our culture?

45:05

Well, it's not through fear. Yeah, it is a reminder to us that when we hold to our principles, even when we face adversities and persecution and isolation from the culture, the way we bear up under those adversities becomes an incredible testimony to others.

45:31

The world is watching. And so the question that the church has to ask is, what do they see when they watch?

45:39

Do they see us joyously raising our children, enjoying our marriages, taking delight in God's creation, pressing forward the claims of Christ into every arena, utilizing our gifts and our abilities to launch new enterprises and businesses and all of the rest?

46:02

If the world sees that, they will either be profoundly attracted or they will be terrified.

46:14

Yeah. And both of those are appropriate responses. Psalm 14 and Psalm 53, which are almost identical except for a couple of places in verse 5 of Psalm 53, declare that those who say in their heart, there is no

46:35

God, are terrified where there is no terror.

46:40

So it's an appropriate response for the world to look at us and say, ooh, those people are scary.

46:48

They're a threat to democracy, man. And the truth is that their view of democracy, which is a man is at the center of all things and he gets to do whatever he wants, they're right.

47:01

We don't buy into that. What we buy into is the glorious freedom that Christ gives us when we walk in the way of truth.

47:12

And I think you would agree with me when I say that every era of Reformation and Revival, at the center of it has been

47:19

Christians who believe that. Absolutely, yes. So here we have the best of the optimists, the best of the ones who are really, even in adversity in England, they're persevering, they're preaching the gospel, they're going to jail, they're being burned at the stake in some ways.

47:39

There's reports of that. And then they leave. Then you have this sort of domino effect in England where the theological vision of Christendom becomes more pessimistic.

47:55

How does that impact the next 200 to 250 years of the church?

48:02

Well, several things happen. There were always going to be new renewal movements.

48:08

So despite the loss of that leavening effect that the

48:16

Puritans could have brought, nevertheless, we still, two generations later, we get our

48:24

Whitfields and Wesleys and Wilberforce and Chalmers, and they begin the process of real renewal.

48:33

Then we start to see the great revivals throughout

48:39

Skye and the North, the great revivals in Wales. So the world is not bereft.

48:46

There's always the remnant who will bear testimony.

48:52

But when you lose all of that optimism at the center of culture, naturally, people will turn inward.

49:05

Karl Truman has very powerfully pointed out the rise of the imperial self as a hallmark of post -Enlightenment

49:16

Western thinking. Well, you start to see that particularly in England, where the gospel gave rise to an incredible burst of energy and of prosperity.

49:29

We see the Industrial Revolution start in England. But again, people turned inward, and they thought that they did it.

49:39

They were responsible for it. You start to read Spurgeon's sermons in the mid to late 19th century, and you start to realize he is preaching directly at a culture almost identical to ours, where materialism and foolish pride tend to dominate at every turn.

50:05

And so you start to see the crumbling of institutions, institutions that, like the

50:13

Me Too movement, they eat their own. And so the foundations that gave rise to things like Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard, those foundations are

50:29

Christian foundations. So when you have these self -conscious nihilists destroying the foundations, the whole edifice begins to collapse.

50:42

It's one of the reasons why I tell people all the time, one of the worst universities in the world today, just in terms of academic achievement and intellectual curiosity and growth of the mind, is

51:01

Harvard. Harvard, of all places, is the worst university in the

51:07

West, followed closely behind by Cambridge and Oxford and Princeton and Stanford and the whole host of others, because they have undermined their very foundations.

51:19

You start to see the crumbling of culture from there. A lot of people in our day are really surprised at how fast it seems our culture has changed, how quickly madness like the transgender movement has taken hold, how gay pride is now a kind of cultural orthodoxy.

51:49

You're not allowed to say anything negative about it. We have major social media companies that enforce a kind of orthodoxy that does not allow dissent, doesn't even allow questions.

52:14

And the truth is, is that this didn't happen overnight. This has been coming for a long, long time.

52:23

I remember Pastor Douglas Wilson said to me that culture decays slowly and then quickly.

52:30

So it's over time, and then it expedites very quickly towards the end.

52:37

Yeah, it's kind of like what people have said,

52:43

H .O. Menken first said it, how do you go broke? Well, slowly at first, and then all of a sudden.

52:51

And that has been the story. We've just not been paying attention.

52:58

People like Antonio Gramsci in the Frankfurt School and a whole host of others have been plotting and planning this strategy to capture the robes of culture for a very long, long time.

53:11

Right. And we're just now seeing their successes.

53:16

And just to bring this back a little bit to what happened in England, it is not surprising to me that in that context is where dispensationalism was born.

53:28

And it's not surprising to me that overall, because dispensationalism

53:34

I think has become a majority view in a lot of places and a lot of expressions of Christianity, it's not surprising to me that culture has grown more wicked without any sort of gospel antiseptic to stop it.

53:54

So for instance, if you go into the doctor and you're diagnosed with cancer and he gives you cough syrup, not effective.

54:01

Like that dispensational, pessimistic sort of outlook has been absolutely the opposite of what would have stopped the spread of like critical race theory and Marxism and things that came in through the

54:18

Frankfurt School. We just didn't have a gospel that was worthy of combating it.

54:24

Right. And in truth, it's not even the gospel because it's so man -centered.

54:31

The gospel is Christ -centered. The gospel is God -centered. But so much of modern evangelicalism is what can make me happier?

54:40

What can make me better? What can make me more prosperous? What are the seven steps to an easy fix for my marriage?

54:50

All of that kind of stuff. That's not the gospel. And so we have, in the name of the gospel, those who are proclaiming something that is not the gospel, well, of course it's not effective.

55:05

Right. Right. I know we're around the hour mark, and I know you're a busy guy, so I do want to make this relevant, though.

55:15

I think we're on to something here. I feel encouraged that I think the downslide in evangelicalism has somewhat leveled out, and I feel encouraged that there's guys like you talking about this, that there's churches like Christ Church in Moscow, the guys out in Ogden, Apologia, even more in the

55:40

Baptist realm of things. There seems to me to be a recovery of the gospel that is happening slowly, but I'm encouraged by it.

55:52

What do you think? As you view the landscape of things right now, not taking into account too much of the context, we believe what the

56:02

Bible says, but what are you seeing is happening right now? Yeah, I am encouraged.

56:08

I'm encouraged knowing that we're in for a rough time.

56:14

We're recording this the morning after the first presidential debate, which was horrible.

56:23

It was. It was just absolutely horrible. On both sides. Yeah, on both sides. There was no substance whatsoever.

56:31

Now, admittedly, Trump was coherent, but Trump was just Trump.

56:36

What a standard. Yeah, and I felt so sorry for Joe Biden.

56:43

It was terrible. What that means is that there's not a quick fix politically.

56:50

My dear friend, Doug Wilson, who I was with all week this last week, he's reminded at every opportunity, we don't have a political solution.

57:04

There's not one on the horizon. We need to stop looking for that. We need to be engaged.

57:11

We need to be involved. We need to make wise choices. We need to elect good magistrates.

57:17

But what I would say is make sure that you're focusing most of your attention on things like school boards and state legislators and governors rather than Washington.

57:33

Washington's not the solution. It is the problem, but it's not the solution. So while I say

57:42

I'm encouraged and I'm optimistic, I'm also very realistic about this particular moment, the circumstances that we live in.

57:52

But with the rise of classical Christian education, the rise of homeschooling, the rise of movements like what we see in the

58:02

CRAC and I'm in the PCA, what we're seeing - There's a conservative resurgence in the

58:09

PCA. Absolutely. And we've been fighting like mad for 20 years to get us there. And we're not all the way there yet.

58:16

But the truth is that God is at work in the same way that he was with Wilberforce and Chalmers in the 19th century.

58:30

I'm convinced that we're witnessing the rise of some really remarkable, reformed, covenantal, optimistic, gospel -proclaiming resurgence in our day that will make a difference for our children and our grandchildren, but it's not a quick fix.

58:55

It's not an instantaneous fix. I think that I was impressed by this earlier when you were talking about it.

59:02

I feel like we're kind of in a Jan Hussian era where it's small, but it's going to lay the foundation for the

59:10

Luthers and the Calvins that come maybe generations from now, that the church ought to be faithful, focused on the gospel, focused on, okay, we're going to be a faithful church, we're going to make faithful families, have people enter into faithful marriages, raise up covenant children, but we're not going to take back culture, likely.

59:32

We don't know the future, but likely in this time period, we're going to lay the foundation for future brothers and sisters to build upon.

59:40

Amen. Those of us who have opportunities to teach and train and disciple, we need to have the mentality that we are building for a day that we will never see.

59:53

Yeah, good. We want our children and our grandchildren to stand on our shoulders and see further than we could have ever seen.

01:00:03

And if we build for the day that we will not yet, that we will never see, we will be walking in the way of our forefathers.

01:00:13

That's what the heroes of the past did. Stephansdom plots in Vienna, it took 450 years to build that.

01:00:22

You know, they built it knowing that they would never see it finished, and they undertook this task across multiple generations knowing that they were building for a day that they would not see.

01:00:38

So I think you're right. I think that classical Christian school movement and the homeschool movement and the church planting movement that we're witnessing today is a kind of Wycliffe Huss Grota opportunity.

01:00:55

And it's so counter -cultural that it just seems right because our culture is so wrong on so many ways.

01:01:05

This is just my thoughts on this. I'd love to hear yours. We've got to repent of our

01:01:12

Americanism, of thinking that top -down solutions are going to fix things.

01:01:19

And really, I remember I was talking to Pastor Wilson, and I asked him, you know, like, what are the steps?

01:01:25

What would you lay out? And he said, Christians just need to be Christians. And then once men have learned to lead themselves, then marry and learn how to lead a wife.

01:01:35

And once they've learned how to do that, well, have children and learn how to lead them. Once they learn how to do that, then start worrying about your neighborhood.

01:01:42

Man, if we would just do that and live for that day that we're never going to see, and putting aside the sort of whatever it is, the necessity to enjoy the fruit of our labor, this microwave cultural thing that's added in where we feel like if we do something that doesn't produce immediate effect, then it's not faithful.

01:02:05

If we could get rid of some of those things and just work faithfully, put our hand to the plow, not look back, hand our hammer off to our sons who will work on a part of the wall that we didn't get to.

01:02:19

Man, if we could do that, it would turn around. Our job is just to do the next right thing.

01:02:25

Yeah. So my encouragement to all of the young men that I encounter is go find a wife, get married, have babies, baptize them, raise them up in the faith, and then trust that the

01:02:46

Lord will fulfill His very great and precious promises. Amen. Amen.

01:02:51

That's a good word, brother. And to anyone who's watching as we wind down, share this message.

01:02:58

That's another way that you can do it. We live in a glorious time period of technology where you can put this information in front of other people and have them wrestle with it and understand it.

01:03:09

The things we've been talking about today are just basic biblical truths, but we live in a world right now that's so illiterate to biblical truth that a great step that you can do is just get this content in front of other people.

01:03:21

And with that, brother, I want to ask you, where are you at? I know you're in Tennessee.

01:03:27

Where can we find sermons or blogs or books, things that you've been working on so that we can continue to learn and grow as Christians in this world?

01:03:36

GeorgeGrant .net. We have an app, the Stand Fast app, that has sermons and curriculum and talks and blogs and all of that kind of stuff.

01:03:48

I have a podcast on the Fight Life Feast Network called

01:03:55

Resistance and Reformation. I have a piece that I do for World Radio on Fridays on words called

01:04:04

Wordplay. And then my books are available everywhere, including

01:04:10

Amazon. Everywhere fine books are sold and Amazon. That's right. Brother, I am so encouraged.

01:04:18

I'm so thankful and so just captivated by just looking through the history of the church.

01:04:27

And, you know, I know that the guys who came before us could not see where we would be at, and we're not going to be able to see where our children are at.

01:04:34

But that idea of slow, steady, faithful living is so captivating to me.

01:04:40

And I'm so thankful that you highlighted these things for us, brother. Amen. Amen. God bless you.

01:04:46

God bless you. And hopefully when I come down to North Carolina, I'll swing by Tennessee and come see you guys.

01:04:52

I'm actually from North Carolina, so hearing that you're from Tennessee is fun. I'd love to see you anytime.

01:05:01

Well, praise the Lord. Brother, God bless you and thank you again. Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast.

01:05:08

We're so excited about what God is doing with this channel. I'm excited that you've been sharing this content, passing it along to other folks.

01:05:16

Help us continue to do that. Continue to get the gospel of hope out to more people. And thank you so much to Dr.

01:05:23

Grant. What an incredible episode and encouragement to all of us to continue to be faithful in the little things right now as God continues to build in times that we will never see.

01:05:35

Let us catch a vision for that and let us be faithful in that. And until next time, God richly bless you.