Dead Men Walking Podcast LIVE from Fight Laugh Feast: Gary DeMar

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00:02

Yeah, okay.

00:10

Do you have enough time for that? That work? Yeah, 15. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Sweet. Yeah, I would,

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I'd probably keep you longer than that, but yeah. Yep, just check.

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Gary DeMar, G -A -R -Y -D -E -M -A -R, Marietta, Georgia.

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Okay. Can you hear yourself okay, Gary? Yes. Okay. Yep, just make sure we stay right up on that mic.

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It's a little loud in here, so. All right, let's just give us 10 seconds for the intro and then we'll get going.

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the fascinating sub... Hold on. Uh -oh.

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location,

01:05

Dead Men Walking starts now. Well, hello everyone.

01:16

We are still live at Fight, Laugh, Feast Conference in, well, formerly Nashville. Now we're outside of Nashville in Franklin.

01:23

We have another wonderful guest for us today, and he just happened to stop by. We're a couple booths down from each other,

01:29

Mr. Gary DeMar. How are you, sir? Doing well. Good to be here. We're on break right now, and we just wanted you to jump on, introduce yourself to our listeners.

01:36

I'm sure the listeners and viewers, probably some of them do know who you are, but can you just give us a little two -minute bio of who you are, what you've done, and we'll go from there.

01:45

Yeah, I'm President of American Vision. We're out of Powder Springs, Georgia. I've been with American Vision since actually 1980, and as I look around,

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I'm probably the oldest person here. I took note of that. American Vision is a

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Christian worldview ministry. We help Christians see that the Bible applies to every area of life, and then we supply educational materials to show how that application works out in various areas of life, from government, education, politics, ethics, apologetics, science, the whole gambit of what constitutes a

02:21

Christian worldview. Wow, and that's much needed in this culture. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons we're in the mess we're in today is because Christians have kind of cloistered themselves in a kind of a quietistic, pietistic realm that they call the

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Christian world, and they've allowed the rest of the world to be taken over by secularists who borrow our intellectual capital and actually turn it on us to try to destroy us, and of course, if they're consistent with that, the long -term implications for us are going to be disastrous.

02:55

Which is kind of the themes of this conference, it seems like, almost not retreating back into our kind of Christian -y life.

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We have our two hours on Sunday and then maybe a midweek, and we get our Starbucks in the morning, and we make sure, you know, we try to act out the

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Christian life, but instead, we need to go on the offense instead of defense. What's your particular area of study that, well,

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I know you have multiple areas, but which one are you asking theologians, scholars, people who are authors, professors like yourself, what's the thing you just dive into and you just love to kind of roll around in when it comes to the

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Bible or doctrine or theology? I do like eschatology the most because it's more of a purely exegetical enterprise.

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Correct. And I also like puzzles, and eschatology is kind of a puzzle.

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It is. You've got to find the operating assumptions, and it's also wedded to apologetics, because the reason

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I got into the whole thing with eschatology, I wrote a series of books called God and Government. I bought those last night.

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I just bought those too. Yeah, yeah. And for the listeners, please go check out his list of books because they're just absolutely amazing.

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So many, so many. So I would go out and I'd speak on that topic, and invariably, someone would come along and say, you know,

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Mr. DeMar, you know, isn't Jesus coming soon? We're living in the last days. All the signs seemed to point to that, and I needed to deal with that eschatologically because in 1948,

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Lindsey had written a book called The Late Great Planet Earth, and he had made these predictions about that things were going to take place within 40 years of Israel becoming a nation again in 1948, and you can do the math, 1948 plus 40 is 1988.

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Yeah, we're a little past that. And I was, you know, our first God and Government book I wrote was 1982, so six years is left.

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And so I had to deal with the eschatological arguments that were being raised to refute that idea.

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And you're right. Here we are. This is 2020. We're still here. So we are 50 years, we're a half a century from 1970 when

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Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. Right. And I firmly believe that one of the reasons we're in the mess we're in today is because of that shortened time frame, you know, why bother with all this sort of thing?

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So and that's why I have a talk right before David Bonson, it's a short talk, and I'm going to kind of pull all this together for everybody.

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Yeah, we're looking forward to that. And many of them don't understand all of this. They've never had it all put together, you know, for them.

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Yeah, that was my tradition growing up. It was pre -Trib. Sure. You know, everything's going to hell in a handbasket.

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The Kirk Cameron. Yeah, Kirk Cameron. You know, yeah. Left behind series. Well, I don't think Kirk Cameron is that anymore.

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No, I just meant as the actor, not as the person. Let me tell you a little bit about Kirk. Yeah, he's probably he may be obsessed.

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Sorry, Kirk. I was hoping to see him here. I didn't know. In fact, I heard that he had he was here,

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I think last week, okay, at a church. Gotcha. I did this thing down in LaGrange, Georgia a number of years ago, and Kirk has a ministry to terminally ill children and their parents, it was to kind of get them away, take care of the kids and let the parents get away and relax a little bit.

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Yeah, sure. But a good friend of mine, Marshall Foster, had said, Kirk, you need to watch this video series by a friend of mine.

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I've known Marshall for years, and it was a video series on Matthew 24.

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And Kirk watched that. And every time he put one of the DVDs in, he was like, well, you know,

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I agree with that. And then I agree with that. He said, when I get to the sun, moon and stars, he says there's no possible way that he could convince me that that applies to events leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem in 1870.

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And when he put it in, he was, you know, convinced. And as a result, you can kind of see it in his messages and what he's doing today.

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Very optimistic, very forward thinking on all of this. And this is happening all over the place.

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And this is, it's amazing how many people came up to me at the booth, a table, and saying,

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I read your book, Last Day's Madness, or Jesus Coming Soon, it just completely changed my outlook.

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And it does. And you can see all these young children here, I mean, lots of young children here.

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Yes. Which is another indication these people believe in the future. Right. Yeah, exactly. I started watching more of Apologia whenever Jeff Durbin started talking

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Matthew 24 for about a year. He went through every... I didn't take that long. Yeah, yeah.

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Right. But he then started talking about Uncle Gary, is what he refers to you as, right?

08:02

Yes, David Shannon. That was David Shannon's, the Chocolate Knox's moniker for me. Sure. Gotcha.

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Yeah. But yeah, but I went down the rabbit hole and, I mean, just blew my mind. I mean, my eschatology,

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I had no idea that these different verses were in the Bible to explain what is going on, and it's post -milk, it's partial preterism.

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Would you refer to yourself as a... Yeah, I call myself... That was the next question I was going to ask, because we asked Sam Storms the exact same thing when he was on, and we said, we're going to give you the challenge of, in five minutes or less, give us your end -time eschatology stance, and Bible reference it, and just wrap it up in a nice, tight package for us, for those listening or viewing.

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Go. I describe myself as a partial futurist rather than partial preterist, because I am more preterist than I am futurist, and that's part of this puzzle that I'm still working on a number of passages that I haven't figured out, not because they just don't fit into my system.

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I've looked at all the other positions, and we tend to slight these passages because of tradition, and it's hard to see anything beyond that, but a book

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I came across when I was in seminary in the 1970s was a book by Marcellus Kick, K -I -K, it was a book that was published in 1948, and it was on a cart that the librarian was selling some of his library, and it just had

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Matthew 24 on the spine. I had tried to work, when

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I was a brand -new Christian in 1973, I started reading through the Gospel of Matthew, I got to those prophetic passages, and I just couldn't reconcile them.

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They seemed to be saying that these things were going to happen before that generation passed away. I put it on the shelf, I looked at some commentaries, and I wasn't satisfied, so I picked up Marcellus Kick's book, and that was it.

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Here's the reason why. It's not because he used new arguments, he simply used the

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Bible to interpret itself, compared Scripture with Scripture. So when I go out and I talk about eschatology, all you need is your

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Bible, and so let's look at this passage in relation to this passage, and look at the audience relevance, and then you look at the context, pay close attention to those time texts, near, shortly, quickly, this generation, and so forth.

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And it's transformative for numerous people, because once you follow that hermeneutic, then you apply that same hermeneutic to the rest of the

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Bible. Right, right. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this God and Government book, and some of the revelations that will come out of the reading of that,

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I mean, how do you tie in a lot of that to what's happening right now, you know, politically, I mean, even

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BLM, and you know. Yeah, the title's God and Government, and I know most people, when they hear that title, they think

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God and Politics, but it's not, it's God and Government, and if you look at Isaiah chapter 9, it says, the

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Government shall be on his shoulders, which means, it's a singular, the

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Government, and God is the Governor of all things, he's the Sovereign Governor of all things, and then he has delegated three governments, family, church, and state, undergirded by self -government.

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So true government begins with God, at the top, and the Sovereign, and these three delegated governments, limited in their spheres, family government, parents are leaders, church government, you have elders and deacons, civil government, you have ministers,

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I mean, the Greek word that's used in Romans 13 is diakonos, like a deacon, they all have their spheres of responsibility and jurisdictionally separate, but undergirding all that is the individual, self -government.

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If you don't have good self -government, family breaks down, the church breaks down, and what happens is, is that the civil magistrate, who now has the power of the sword, can, you know, do its will.

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It's 1 Samuel chapter 8, it's, you know, hey, you're going to give this power to tax you ten percent, wouldn't that be something?

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That would be amazing. Somebody says, be careful, he can tax you more than God, more than ten percent.

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Kamala, however you say her name, she's talking 77 percent. I mean, ten percent taxes is a tyranny.

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Yeah, we're close to 55, 56 percent when you take in secondary taxes. Oh, sure. I mean, I have to pay the state $55 to harvest deer from my own land, that's a secondary tax.

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Vehicle registration, property tax, death tax, capital gains tax, sales tax, I mean, the gas tax, it goes on and on.

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So let's not be fooled and think a 21 percent income, federal income tax is what we pay. We give more than half of what we earn to the federal, state, and local government.

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You know, state tax, you know, state taxes, and then you got property taxes. Property taxes. In fact, when

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I was real young, when I was in high school, I worked at a gas station. And on the gas stations, the pumps used to tell you how much tax was being taken out.

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Go now and you won't find that. No, no. They don't want you to see it. And they jump on the oil companies for all the money they're making.

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Well, they're only making, you know, pennies on the dollar.

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And yet they're doing all of the discovery and the shipping and the refining, and you just go on down the line with all this thing.

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Gets to the end of the production line, and then our government in Michigan says, we're going to tax on a dynamic 22 cents per gallon tax, which means it flows with the price of the gas.

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We just changed it from a static to a dynamic. Yeah. And here's the thing with that. People get upset with the oil companies.

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And all the government's doing is just sitting back and collecting the money. In fact, they're not even collecting it. They're having you collect it for them.

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And they've done none of the experimentation, none of the, you know, anything. And none of the research, the development, anything.

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And they get it. And we can talk about that. I'm an elected county commissioner in my state, and I preside over a $50 million county budget.

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That's 65 % of it is property tax. I'm happy to say that we have a very fiscally conservative board.

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We've given back $2 million. We've actually reduced our budget and provided more services to the taxpayers. That's not what you're supposed to do,

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Greg. I know it isn't, but guess what? We did it smartly. We did it by investments. We did it by our bond rating, and we did it by not spending a rainy day fund on frivolous things.

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We're fiscally wise. And I believe that type of discernment and wisdom, those principles of God can be done in local government and should be done in local government.

14:46

But as we finish up here, Gary, why don't you give us a little preview for everyone listening and watching of what you're going to be talking about in this next segment without giving away too much.

14:57

We know it's live stream, so don't be a spoiler for us, but what are we talking about? Well, they've let me wedge myself in.

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If you look at the schedule, I'm - Gary the Wedge DeMar. I'm not there yet.

15:10

Gary the Wedge, yeah. So a good wrestling name. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was linebacker. I played linebacker in high school.

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You were a shot putter. There we go. Yeah, okay. Uh -oh, he's reliving his high school days. Watch out. So the thing is,

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I suspect that most people here don't know how they got here.

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Not that they didn't come by, you know, plane or car. Car, train or automobile. Yeah. They don't know the connections of what got them here.

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They need to know. And there are a couple of other things.

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I was a student of Greg Bonson when I was at Reformed Theological Seminary. Maybe a lot of people here don't even know who

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Greg Bonson is. Right. I know a lot of them do. Bought his book that you just put out recently. Yeah.

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Last night. So what I'm going to do in a short amount of time, because I know time is precious and so forth.

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Providentially, I'm going to be speaking right before David Bonson, Greg's son, is going to be speaking. I'm going to put all this together in about seven or eight minutes.

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So they walk away with some appreciation of what happened to get them here that transformed their lives.

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And it's a tremendous story. In fact, I did a series with Darren Doan.

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It was called Freestyling with Gary DeMar. Yeah, it's a podcast. Yeah, yeah. And I went through kind of the history of all that.

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I don't know how many segments there are. Darren just sat me down. I think there's three or four. He didn't even tell me what we were going to talk about.

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It needs to be told and how significant all of those things were.

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This never would have been possible without a couple of key moments in history.

17:09

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, as we wrap up, can you give the listeners and the viewers a little information on where they can find your books, your works, your blog, your podcast, where you want to send them?

17:19

The best place to go is AmericanVision .org, AmericanVision .org. I write a daily article

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Monday through Friday. We have a catalog of products, which if you saw the table, we almost sold out of everything.

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I've got some new books. I have a brand new book coming out called Restoring the Foundation of Civilization, God's Government or Chaos.

17:41

Wow. Well, thank you, Gary. Thank you. So much for coming on. We look forward to your chat later today. Gary DeMar, everyone.