August 18, 2017 Show with Tom Ascol on “A ‘Monumental’ Outrage: One Southern Baptist Pastor’s Response to the Removal & Vandalism of Confederate Statues”

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 18th day of August 2017.

I'm so delighted to have back on the program someone who's a dear friend of mine who

I love interviewing and I'm looking forward to hearing him and seeing him preach again at the upcoming

G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia from the 18th through the 20th of January.

But I'm speaking of Dr. Tom Askell, Executive Director of Founders Ministries and Senior Pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

Today, in light of the disturbing headlines we are seeing daily and news updates primarily in Charlottesville, Virginia, we're going to be talking about a monumental outrage, one

Southern Baptist pastor's response to the removal and vandalism of Confederate statues.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Tom Askell. Well, thank you,

Chris. It's an honor to be back with you. I'm always glad to have this privilege. And before we go into the subject at hand, oh, first of all, let me introduce on the air here that I have in studio my co -host, the

Rev. Buzz Taylor. It's really good to be here and especially to finally, I think we're going to get some answers on this subject now finally, right?

Yeah, well, at least from one Southern Baptist pastor's answers. That's good. And before we go into the subject at hand,

I want you to let our listeners know something about Founders Ministries. Our audience has grown quite a bit,

I believe, from the last time we had you on the program. I'm getting emails nearly every single day, sometimes multiple times a day from people who have never heard of the program before and have just recently discovered it and fallen in love with it.

So there may be people who listen to Iron Turpenzine Radio who are still unfamiliar with you and Founders Ministries in Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

So why don't you start off with Founders Ministries. Yeah, thank you, Chris. Founders is a ministry that began back in 1982 when a group of us who were

Southern Baptists, we were in the early years of the big inerrancy controversy in our convention, and we had all come to Reformed convictions about salvation.

And we realized that inerrancy is very important, but inerrancy wasn't enough, that we were going to have to ultimately address the teachings of the

Bible, the central teaching of the Bible about how God saves sinners. And so we met together, prayed, thought, and decided to have a conference, and out of that developed what is today

Founders Ministries. And so we host conferences, we publish books, we have a website that has a ton of resources on it.

It's founders .org, just www .founders .org, that you can go and access all of our material and read about us.

But we're really a ministry that's committed not just to the Southern Baptist Convention of Churches, but to all churches.

We want to see the gospel recovered and local churches biblically renewed and reformed.

And when we say the gospel recovered, we're not talking about Calvinism per se. We are Calvinists. But we really do believe that the central message of the

Bible, that God saves sinners by grace alone, through faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone, has been lost in many sectors of the

Christian church, largely because it's been assumed. And what you assume, very soon you will lose sight of.

And we think that has happened time and again, and we want to just call attention to it and encourage churches to take seriously what the

Bible's message is, that God has done a saving work for sinners in His Son, Jesus Christ, and to call churches to make that central in their identity and in their ministry.

Amen. Well, also, let us know something about Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

Well, this is a wonderful congregation. I have just finished my 31st year here, so I'm in my 32nd year.

And it's a Baptist church that has been around, I think, existed about three years before I got here.

I'm the second pastor. It's had a troubled history, troubled beginning, but by God's grace, it's just been so kind to us.

We are a confessional church. The 1689 Confession is our fullest confession that all of our elders and deacons and teachers would agree with.

We don't require that for membership, because we realize people are at different stages in their spiritual life.

Many new believers and believers that haven't been taught so well, perhaps, through their lives, we want to welcome in under the understanding of who we are and what we understand the

Church to be and how we operate. So we're down here in what my children affectionately call the toenail of the

United States. And in Southwest Florida, we're grateful for the fellowship we have with other churches of like mind that are trying to do our best to make

Christ known here in this region and beyond. Yeah, and there is a connection between the church where I'm a member,

Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida, not only because of our theological convictions, but also because of a dear saint who is now in eternity with Christ, Ernie Reisinger, who was a member for many years at Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

He was the founder of the church where I am a member, Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle.

Yeah, that's right. And Ernie is the human reason that I am here in Cape Coral.

He retired here and began to attend this church. And I came out to visit him one time, and during that time, he had become the interim pastor after the founding pastor of the church.

And the congregation asked me to preach, or the deacons did, and then through that, a series of events unfolded that resulted in me coming here.

And Ernie was a dear friend, a mentor, a man who had a large influence in my life.

I thank God for him. His son, only son, only child, is here with us now. He's just rotated off being an elder with us, but he and his wife,

Barb, are faithful members here and have been great sources of gospel encouragement to multitudes of people in their years that they've been a part of this church.

Yes, and in fact, one of Ernie's relatives is still a member here at Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, Jonathan.

Oh, Jonathan was just with us this last weekend. He came down to visit. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, he was a member here for a few years.

He came down in, I forget, maybe three or four years, but it's been a long time since I'd seen him. Great. Well, I hope you send my loving greetings to Frank and Carmen Gilberti.

Absolutely. Who were dear friends of mine and my precious late wife.

They were members of the church where my late wife was a member, and I can fondly remember many, many times of fellowship in the

Gilberti home in Lindenhurst, Long Island, and Carmen's phenomenal

Puerto Rican cooking and all of that fellowship. Theological talk, me and Frank would usually wind up alone in his study, having in -depth theological conversations, and I think that the memories of those beat any kind of drug addiction or anything.

The high I got from having these theological conversations with Frank are something that I will always cherish.

Amen, and what a sweet couple they are. Frank's one of our deacons. They are living in a community where they are practicing hospitality with their neighbors, evangelizing their neighbors, having

Bible studies. It is just such a great encouragement to be around them, and they are a tremendous blessing to this church.

Now, just for a brief moment, going back to Founders Ministries. Founders Ministries has that name because the vast majority of the founders of the

Southern Baptist Convention were thoroughly Calvinistic or Reformed or believers in the doctrines of sovereign grace.

Isn't that true? Yes, I would say it even more strongly than that, that all of the 293 delegates that showed up in May of 1845 in Augusta, Georgia to begin the

Southern Baptist Convention of Churches came from churches or associations that held to the

Second London Confession of Faith, primarily in its Philadelphia or Charleston forms, but they all had those confessions, that confession as their theological foundation.

So that is the roots from which we come. Yeah, I routinely make nearly that identical statement, and I'm always having somebody trying to bat me over a little bit further to the left, well,

I don't know about all of them and all that kind of thing. So I just parse my words differently, just trying to not hear that rebuke again or rebuttal or what have you.

Well look, if somebody says that to you, ask them if they would just give you the name and evidence of one of those 293 of whom that is not true.

And well, today we were supposed to be hearing an announcement, and it may have come unbeknownst to me, but the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, and I don't know if it's

Signer or Signer, but his name is Mike, S -I -G -N -E -R, was supposed to publicly make a final decision as to whether or not the

Robert E. Lee statue was going to be removed from what was once known as Lee Park.

And there, obviously, many of our listeners know that just several days ago there was a tragic death.

A young woman was killed because a very mentally sick and twisted and evil individual drove his vehicle into the crowd with intention to bring about harm, and this young lady was killed.

But there was, prior to that, an uproar over this statue.

Those on one side of the protest outraged over the existence of the statue, or any statue that in any way hearkened back to the days of the

Confederacy, and outraged that anyone involved in that, in the

Confederacy and in the war against the Union Army during the

Civil War, that anyone involved in that would be viewed upon in any heroic fashion.

And then you had, on the other hand, the extreme opposite end, those evil individuals who were white supremacists and neo -Nazis who,

I don't even know if they even are thoroughly knowledgeable about the heroes they claim as their own, especially

I'm talking about the Nazis that they claim as their heroes, because I always find it interesting when people refer to Nazis and neo -Nazis as right -wing when there's really very little difference between Nazism, genuine

National Socialism, and Communism. There's not that much difference between the two, so why everybody calls

Nazis and their modern -day cohorts why they would be referred to as right -wing

I don't know. But we have a situation now where it's been daily on the news, on all news outlets, going over and over and over again this tragic situation we find ourselves in, and I know that you are not only a

Southerner, but a Southern Baptist pastor, and I know that you're also, first and foremost, a

Christian who is very biblically literate and who has a heart of a shepherd and has the gospel first and foremost in your heart and mind above and beyond anything like statues and memorials and monuments.

So I wanted to get your response to what was going on because it's probably going to be a lot more balanced than anyone on either side might think.

Well, that's kind of you, and I don't know if that's true or not, but I can tell you that my response as I watched those images and read the reports as they came in was just extremely visceral.

I was overwhelmed with grief, sorrow. I'm a child of the 60s and 70s, and in my hometown of Beaumont, Texas, lived through race riots and just all kinds of racial strife, personally involved in that, all the way through.

So it just brought back vivid memories and heartbreak, heartbreak. So in the wake of it,

I found myself increasingly saddened by the responses of people, and I'm not so much concerned about the responses of civic leaders or political pundits or political leaders.

I don't expect much from them. But I was grieved by the response of several

Christian voices all across the spectrum. And so it's just set me to thinking, and I actually addressed our congregation about this earlier this week after I formulated some of my thoughts, and they're not fully and completely formulated yet, but it just reminded me that if we ever forget or if we ever doubted whether or not any political party or philosophy can do what we need to have desperately done in our nation, the events of the last few days should surely have disabused us of that notion.

And we're in a desperate situation in our country. I think we have been for a while. It's just become increasingly evident where the only hope we have is the gospel of the

Lord Jesus. All we have to hope in is God's grace for sinners in Christ Jesus.

And I don't know that we believe that as strongly as we need to. I don't think we feel how desperate our situation actually is.

And if we did, I believe that as Christians and as churches, it would cause us to live differently, to think differently, to have different priorities than what we typically have.

So I've come through these last several days, weeks, months, even years as these things have kind of just been broiling over more and more to a more settled conclusion that we are in desperate need of what only

God can do. And if God doesn't act, if God doesn't make bear his right arm, if he doesn't come and revive us, we don't see significant recovery of the genuine

Christian faith as it's given to us in scripture, that our nation very easily could join the ash heap of nations that we have seen throughout human history.

Amen. And let me give our email address once again if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

Tom Askell. It is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

And please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. Perhaps you're frightened to give your opinion because of where you live perhaps, or perhaps you just disagree with your own pastor on this or your own spouse, or there's some reason why you want to remain anonymous.

If it's about a personal and private matter, I understand. But if it's not that, if it's not about a personal and private matter, please at least give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

And well, we are all sinners. All of humanity since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden have been and will continue to be sinners until we are in glory for eternity with Christ.

I know that there is some debate amongst Christians whether the redeemed should be categorized as sinners, even though they obviously recognize that all

Christians commit sin. Some Christian brothers of ours do not like the term sinners as a label for anyone who are considered among the regenerate body of Christ.

But putting that debate aside of labels, we all commit sin. That is surely something that all

Christians agree upon, that we sin more than we even realize. So our heroes of the past are no different.

In fact, I just had a recent interview with an

Orthodox Presbyterian pastor who is African American, and he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. And I was posing a question to him about the difference between viewing someone as a

Christian hero and viewing somebody as a national hero because of the fact that we can rightly view people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and others as national heroes.

But when it comes to folks like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and people of that ilk who never made any clear evidence or never demonstrated any clear evidence that they were truly born -again individuals, to consider them

Christian heroes is problematic. And I was presenting that same reasoning in regard to Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. that I think he is an American hero, but to consider him a

Christian hero is problematic. But the point being that all of our heroes even are men at best, the best of men, or men at best as they say, and these are men who have sinned and sinned in various ways with various levels of extremity and so on.

And we have a difficult situation here on how to view these men who were heroes of the

Confederate cause that have even become Christian heroes to the modern -day church.

And some of those men were clearly, overtly, and undebatably

Christian. Robert E. Lee, when I have read things about his life and his devotion to God, and I even visited many years ago the church where he on occasion preached, and I visited his tomb and so on, and learned much about him, he surely was a brother in Christ, was he not?

Well, from all that I know of him, yes, that seems to be the case. And so when we have folks like this,

I think that in the public eye now, because of monuments, how do we respond to the outrage because of the fact that although it has been said, although there's some debate about it, it has been said that Robert E.

Lee was personally opposed to slavery and fought for the

South primarily because he was fighting for his homeland, there is that blemish on the fact that he was opposed to slavery.

And I think that in American history, that we were practicing something that was very evil in the sight of God, and I'm assuming you would agree that the slavery that existed here in the

United States of America is different than the slavery that was condoned in the scriptures.

The slavery, from what I understand from my study of slavery in the scriptures, these were people that were either prisoners of war or they sold themselves into slavery because they could not provide for their own families or themselves.

There were other reasons than race that made a person a slave, whereas in the slavery that existed in Europe and the

United States until the 19th century, you had people being kidnapped which is something punishable by death in the old covenant, being kidnapped and being sold and being treated like animals.

And of course that doesn't mean that there weren't kind and more gentle and gracious slave masters who just inherited a situation and a system that existed centuries before they were born.

But you have this dilemma on how we are to view these people such as Robert E.

Lee and Stonewall Jackson and other people who we have heard were

Christians, but at the same time they are inseparably attached to this stain on American history.

Yeah, without a doubt, and there's no way to look at that otherwise.

Slavery was a horrific national sin, a cultural sin that is in our nation's heritage.

There's no way around that. And the men that condoned it and some who even defended it in the name of biblical

Christianity, they're good men that you and I would know and look back at history and appreciate many of the things that they wrote who defended slavery as an institution from scripture.

And I think what's wrong is blind spots. And the reality is that we all have blind spots.

I love Calvin, I love Luther, but my goodness, if everything

Calvin and Luther said and advocated was true, we'd be in difficulties today and I could never defend everything that those men said and advocated.

So your point about the best of men meant it best is true, and maybe even more central to that is that we all have blind spots.

It's cheap and it's easy to look back to an earlier generation and measure them by our standards today or ideas that maybe have come to a fuller appreciation in how we understand them than what was true a few hundred years ago.

That's easy low fruit picking and it doesn't do anybody any good. Every generation has its own cultural baggage and difficulties that it needs to think through in the light of the scripture.

I'm sure that's true for me, for you, for this generation of Christians, reformed Christians. I've got holes in my theology.

I know that that's true. I just don't know where they are. And future generations hopefully will be in a better position to understand and see them more clearly than I do.

And yet if they measure me by their clearer understanding than what I have and condemn my actions in the light of that, well, it would be easy to do and they can make mincemeat of what

I'm not seeing or seeing through a dark cloud right now. So I just think that's cheap, it's ahistorical, it's anachronistic, and it's not helpful to this debate.

Yes, let's acknowledge they're sinners. Their advocation of slavery was wrong. Slavery is an institution.

Man stealing certainly was wrong. Chattel slavery is sin and wicked. It was horrific.

And anybody that advocates it, I would say, is advocating something that is contrary to what God reveals to be right, good, and true.

Now, having said that, does that mean that there's nothing that such people could do or say that we ought not learn from?

Well, not at all. I hope not. If we measure everybody like that, then none of us is going to learn from anyone. One of the things, it's not a justification for anybody's sin, but one of the things that just always blows me away is reading through Hebrews 11 and just looking at the people that are commended as people of faith.

And, you know, I think Paul in Romans 4 says, Abraham had faith not wavering.

Unwavering faith. Go back and read the life of Abraham. Yeah. Did he look like a man of unwavering faith?

He was ready to give up his own life. Yeah, right, exactly. So, and again,

I don't think God's excusing Abraham's sin at all. It's just the reality that we are all broken.

We're all fallen. We all have blind spots. And so I would never try to defend Robert E.

Lee or Stonewall Jackson or anyone who, in their views, where they would advocate something contrary to Scripture.

Let's acknowledge that. I don't, and I think that using those kinds of arguments to justify a political agenda, social agenda, or a sinful agenda, is in reality striking out, not at those men, but it's striking out at God.

And that's what grieved me as I watched what happened over the weekend in Charlottesville. I didn't see that so much in terms of right versus left or white supremacists versus the

Antifa crowd. I mean, it just looked to me like a collective, differing way of screaming and spitting in the face of God.

I mean, these were God -haters out there. Yeah. That broke my heart. Yeah, and the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say.

Well, I want to look beyond even this, and I don't know if you have any opinions on what's really going on here, because I remember years ago there was all the talk all over Christian radio about Christian symbols and plaques and quotes,

Bible quotes and statues. The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments all over the country being removed from public buildings, like even the

Lincoln Memorial. Anything that had anything to do with Scripture anywhere was being removed.

And we were looking like, what's really going on here? And I see that this removal of the statue is just one of many, that monuments are coming down all over the nation.

What do you think is going on here? Well, you know,

I'm about as far away from being a conspiracy theorist as you can get. But I do believe there's a conspiracy, because I know we've got an enemy, and I know he's wise, and he's old, and he's powerful, and he wants to wreak havoc.

And so I know that goes on, and I know he uses all kinds of movements and opportunities like this.

I do think this is a political agenda. I mean, I really do. I think that it is a strategy that has been underway for a while, and I think it's well -funded.

You know, there were advertisements that came out in, I think it was South Carolina or Charleston, maybe, or I don't know where it was, somewhere recently, to pay $25 an hour to actors who were willing to come and participate in protests.

And I think these guys were just saying, you know, so we will train you, you know, and if you don't mind being in protests, it'd be great.

We just want to, this is one way we, it's like writ of protest. And, you know,

I don't believe everything that comes out and telling who the first guy was that tweeted the problems in the park there in Charlottesville.

Maybe that's true or not, but evidently one story is that he had been on, somehow in Obama's administration at some level.

You know, whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I do know this, that if I was the devil and I wanted to wreak havoc upon a nation that has been instrumental in sending the gospel around the world for generations, this would be a pretty good strategy to do it.

We've got to go to our first break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And we do have a number of people already waiting to have their questions asked and answered by Dr.

Tom Askell. And we'll get to as many of you as time will allow. But if you would like to join them on the air with a question, our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned in to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio today, our guest for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is

Dr. Tom Askle, Executive Director of Founders Ministries and Senior Pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

Today we are addressing a monumental outrage, one Southern Baptist pastor's response to the removal and vandalism of Confederate statues.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

As always, please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

U .S .A., and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. We have a question for you,

Dr. Askle, from Daniel in San Jose, California. He says, Hello brothers.

Dr. Askle, thank you for the Founders Ministry. I've benefited from it greatly.

I love reading the articles that are continually posted on your website. A question I have is,

How can Christians articulate meaningful conversations to those who are in favor of tearing down statues, like Robert E.

Lee, who was a Christian of his time, although we wouldn't fully agree with him on everything he did or believed?

He has one other follow -up question, but I'll let you answer the first before I go to that. Yeah, well, it's a great question.

It's something I've thought about. First of all, I wouldn't try to, at all, argue their points about his sin.

Yeah, okay, he was sinful in his views of not standing as strongly as he should against slavery.

I think Lee was never really for slavery, but he certainly was not kind in all that he did towards slaves and what he said.

So I wouldn't argue that at all, but I think I would try to ask, Well, why do you want the monuments torn down, and what's the point?

What do you hope to gain from that and to help people begin to think why?

Because what's going on today seems to me not to be well thought out. I'm sure it is for some, but from the rank and file, it's just,

Well, this man was evil. He repressed either my people, if I'm a racial minority, or he did something that was evil to the country, so we ought to remove his monument.

Well, what do you hope to accomplish with that, and then help them to think through the implications of their argument?

If that's true, and if you're acting on the basis of some kind of reason, well, then shouldn't that be applied across the board, and where do you stop?

What I fear is that most people have not even begun to think past their immediate emotions that have been frayed over all of this and whipped into a frenzy by people who may be wanting to use them as tools, and then just help them to see,

Look, this is not going to solve repression. This isn't going to solve sin. This isn't going to solve bigotry, and those are issues that are rooted in the heart of a person, and the reason that they are in the heart of a person is because of sin.

We've all sinned, and God made us in his image. We've rebelled against him, and that's why people don't treat each other the way we should.

That's why there's so much inequity and evil in the world as it exists, and if we want to address the root of the problem, then we're going to have to listen to what

God says, not only about the problem itself, but about his provision, which is his son,

Jesus Christ, who came into the world to do what we are obligated to do that we cannot do, which is to live a perfect life before his law, earning righteousness that we owe

God, but we can't pay, and then dying in behalf of sinners, paying the debt that we owe, but again, if we pay, it will take all of eternity in hell, and the only hope for this world is for men and women, boys and girls, to turn from sin and to trust

Jesus Christ as Lord. So I would try to get on that track and help them to see that what they're really striking out against is something that is far more significant than concrete and steel.

They're striking out against a world that isn't the way it's supposed to be, and the reason it's not the way it's supposed to be is because of sin, and so we have every reason to hope to be rescued out of this because of what

God's done for sinners in Christ, but anything that looks to satisfaction or solution apart from Christ is a fool's errand.

So any way you can help get them on that ground and get them thinking and reading the Bible with you, to see what God says about these things

I think could be very helpful. And Daniel's follow -up question is, in order for those in favor of tearing down statues to be consistent, wouldn't they have to tear down more statues than just Robert E.

Lee's? Well, I think so, but I'm not sure that consistency is much of a concern.

I don't either. That are doing this. I mean that seriously. I think this is an emotional temper tantrum, basically.

You know, I think that this is just a reaction, an emotional reaction to felt sense of whether it's oppression or injustice or whatever it is, and so this is an object that has come to the attention as being a worthwhile object of rage and going forth.

So ultimately my fear is that if the pattern is going to be consistent, that we're just back to a world of survival of the fittest, or might makes right, and whatever the mob wants, the mob's going to get.

And that's what I'm grieved for some of our political leaders that seem to be trying to mollify that mentality.

When you do that, there's no end. Well thank you, Daniel, and keep spreading the word about Iron Trip and Zion Radio in San Jose, California and beyond.

Now we have a fellow Texan. You did say that you were born and raised in Texas, didn't you, Tom? Yes, sir.

We have a fellow Texan, Maggie in Dallas, Texas, who says, this is sad and disturbing and happening now.

Where is the law? Christians be reminded that whatever your position, we are not to be activists, correct?

That's Maggie in Dallas, Texas. Well, by activist she means, you know, social protesters.

I would say there's very few things that we ought to get out on the street for, and that typically trying to be social warriors is, if I can quote

Martin Lloyd -Jones here, utter folly. Because we have the gospel, and the gospel is our only hope.

And the church is the only ones given the authority and responsibility to proclaim the gospel.

If the church gets sidetracked with all of these social issues and social causes, we might do some temporary good, but we will do an eternal evil, because we will keep the only solution that the world has available to it from them.

And God's given us the gospel. So I think the most radical thing we can do is proclaim the gospel and cause the gospel.

If they don't, and speak the truth, yes. Tell the truth. And be willing to call sin sin.

White supremacy, those white supremacists that agitated everything in Charlottesville, it is sinful.

They are God -haters. The Antifa crowd that is doing the same thing from a different direction is also evil.

It's wicked. They are God -haters. God has given us his word, he's given us his law, he's given us his gospel.

And if we don't submit to his law and trust his gospel, the only prospect that awaits us is disaster.

It's kind of the chaotic fomenting of these social passions that we're seeing unleashed right now.

Well, thank you, Maggie, in Dallas, Texas. Please keep listening to Iron, Sharp, and Zion Radio and spread the word about it in Dallas, Texas and beyond.

And I wanted to add something, a question of my own in regard to your answer.

I applaud a number of my friends, a couple of whom are pastors that I know personally, who are involved, some of them weekly, in ministry outside of abortion clinics where they are actually not just picketing the abortion clinics, but they are reaching out with tracks and trying to engage women in conversation who are about to have their babies murdered.

And some of these men, one in particular, a pastor friend of mine in Tempe, Arizona, the

Lord has used those gatherings of his church at abortion clinics to rescue over a hundred babies from being murdered because of the mothers of those babies changing their minds about abortion.

When you were saying in agreement with Maggie that we shouldn't be activists, would that fall under that category in your opinion?

No, not at all. And I did have that in mind when I tried to give a little caveat to what I was saying there.

Here's what I would say, though, is that Christians should not be willing to be lawless in our protests unless we are willing to suffer the consequences for breaking those laws.

And there are some laws, if they are unjust laws, godless laws, yes, then let's obey

God rather than men. That's very clear in scripture. Simple disobedience doesn't become an option then, it becomes an obligation.

But if I'm going to break a just law in a good cause, so if I'm going to go to an abortion clinic and lock the doors with chains, then

I need to be prepared to go to jail for breaking a just law that says I shouldn't trespass and do violence in that way.

And I think a lot of Christians, at least early on in the pro -life movement, didn't get that as clearly as what seems to be happening today.

And I applaud those today who are doing what you just described your pastor friends doing.

I've been involved in that personally as well. Many of the people in our church have done that as well. And we have

Rose in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who says, as with so many hot topic issues going on in our culture, such as the one you're discussing today,

I would like to know if you feel pastors should be addressing their congregants from the pulpit concerning it, and she emphasizes in her text, from the pulpit.

Well, you know, that is a personal call, a church call, and I think if I lived in Charlottesville, if our church was in Charlottesville, we would address this in some form on Sunday.

We prayed about it publicly Sunday in our church. I addressed it publicly Wednesday night in our

Bible study and prayer meeting gathering, and we spent a great deal of time praying about this. And I vetted what

I was going to say with my fellow elders. They all approved of it because I didn't want to just go off, you know, with my own little thoughts that might have been imbalanced or not properly anchored as they should be in God's word.

So here's what I did. I addressed the gospel and race Wednesday night, and I started with five basic Christian perspectives.

I said, listen, we must agree on these things if we're thinking biblically. Racism, bigotry, racial justice of every stripe is sinful.

It's an offense against God because we've been made in God's image. Secondly, that ethno -nationalism in all its forms, no matter what the race of those who espouse it, is an assault on the gospel, and it doesn't have any place in a constitutionally governed republic like we have in this nation.

Thirdly, Christians should be at the forefront of racial reconciliation. Our methods are not primarily political or social, but are rooted in the gospel of God's grace, and we want to see all races and ethnicities brought into the one family of God through faith in Christ.

Fourth, as followers of Christ, we must be clear and standing for the gospel, calling all forms of racism a failure to love

God supremely and love others sincerely, and therefore calling it sin. And fifth, the only solution to racism is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So we who know what this gospel is must become increasingly fluent and confident in it, and share it, proclaim it with love and conviction, and live in accordance with it in all that it reveals to us about God and ourselves.

So those were the five kind of foundational points that I started with to help our congregation get some clarity, you know, get back to some biblical clarity in thinking about these issues.

Now there's all kinds of nuances that we can tease out, but if we're not right on these things, it seems to me we're not going to be right very far.

Now, going back to an issue that I opened up the program with, there's no easy answer,

I don't think, to it, and you're always going to have Christians, even perhaps in the same theological camp, perhaps in the same pew at church, disagreeing over this.

But what is your opinion on where to place heroes of our past whose lives were marked by unrepentant sin?

For instance, if someone were to erect a monument to John Newton, there should be no complaint about that monument's existence over the fact that Newton was a slave trader himself, because he repented of it, and he viewed, by the end of his life, he viewed that as a great wicked thing, slavery.

But you have these southern heroes that stood in favor of slavery, and in fact you have,

I mean, even the Union General Ulysses S.

Grant, he held on to his slaves, from what I understand, for a longer period of time than any that Robert E.

Lee inherited. Lee, apparently, from what I've understood, freed his slaves before Ulysses S.

Grant. But in regard to those heroes that we have who died still practicing or endorsing or advocating a sin, and a sin that it really has great ramifications and ripple effects that have even led up to our present day, involving the racial tension and bitterness and hatred and strife that exists in our country today, how do you respond to that as a

Christian? How are we supposed to view these people? To give you an example, I have a friend who led me to Christ 30 years ago, who has that very famous, beautiful painting on her wall of Robert E.

Lee sitting in an armchair with a child in his lap, with a

Bible in his hand, and that's probably hanging on the walls of many Christians throughout the nation.

How do you respond to these situations? Well, first of all, I would just say that if I'm understanding the

Bible right, we're not obligated to build monuments to our heroes. And so, you know, that's not an issue to me.

It's an indifferent thing. So I'm approaching it on the standpoint that this is not something that is commanded, nor is it something that is forbidden in terms of giving honor to whom honors due.

And we can have a debate then about it, as long as we keep it within those categories of the indifferent things.

So if we can do that, we immediately lower the temperature of our conversation, and we might see things differently.

Personally, I'm not offended by monuments or portraits or displays of things and movements that I despise and that I stand against.

I stood in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and looked at the massive portrait of Mao and hate everything that he stood for that I know, and the massive murder that he was responsible for.

But I wouldn't say that the people of China ought to tear down that portrait, that they ought to do that.

I mean, it's part of their history, and I wasn't personally offended. I'm personally offended by what he did, but not by the fact that they have a replica of his image up there.

And so these things, they just don't rise to the level of getting me upset one way or the other too much.

What I get upset about is the way people are using these things now to try to justify certain positions and signifying that they are more virtuous than others, either because they're defending them or they're attacking them.

And sometimes those arguments, if I'm understanding them right, seem to be rooted in something other than a clear -headed reading of the scriptures.

That's what concerns me, especially when I see that being advocated by Christian leaders.

We're going to another break right now. This is our midway break, and we'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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Eastern time for a visit to the pastor's study, because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with about an hour to go, is

Dr. Tom Askle, executive director of Founders Ministries and senior pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida.

We are discussing a monumental outrage, one Southern Baptist pastor's response to the removal and vandalism of Confederate statues.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,

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If you would like to attend the Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, go to alliancenet .org,

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if you have a question on our theme today, a monumental outrage, one Southern Baptist pastor's response to the removal and vandalism of Confederate statues.

And we would love to have Dr. Askell answer those questions to the best of his ability. Dr. Askell, we have

RJ in White Plains, New York, who asks, I heard

Tucker Carlson on Fox News say something remarkable the other day that I agree with wholeheartedly.

He said that there is something more than just the removal of statues going on here. It's a hatred for everyone who is involved in the founding of this nation.

And if these protesters are to be logically consistent, they would also tear up the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution because all of those involved had slaves or were in favor of slavery to some degree.

Do you agree with Tucker Carlson's comments on this? Well, again, if logic were to prevail, this is where that line of reasoning goes.

But I'm not convinced that what we're seeing is born out of any sense of reasoning, at least by the main perpetrators.

I will say that I saw, I think it was yesterday on CNN, that one of their hosts, an

African -American woman, took issue with one of her colleagues and said, when he was trying to make a distinction between George Washington and Robert E.

Lee, and she said there's no distinction at all. They are both guilty. We ought to remove monuments of both of them.

And she was very unashamed in the argument she was making, and I applaud her consistency.

And I think that if there's going to be rational continuation of a line of thinking, that that is where it leads.

But I don't see much rationality, at least on the ground, in what's taking place.

Yes, and that reminds me of, when we're talking about the consistency here, the motivations are not only of primary importance as to what's going on, but there's also a wickedness in regard to arrogance and pride and rebellion in tearing down publicly with great glee and jubilation and defiance.

These landmarks, where they know full well those doing that, are breaking the hearts of decent citizens.

Nobody cares about breaking the hearts of Nazis, and I don't think that the Nazis would care less about Robert E.

Lee's statues. They're looking for a forum to promote their ugly agenda and their ridiculous agenda.

I don't think that any of those, or most of those people, even know what National Socialism stood for, or what

Nazism stood for, other than hatred. They know that much. But the fact that there is a disrespect for the opinions and feelings of people, many of whom had forefathers and relatives and family members, who were part of the

Confederate Army, who were Southerners, and although the modern day family members that live amongst us may oppose the element of slavery that existed, that's sin.

There is more involved to the Civil War than the sin of slavery. There's more involved to the

Confederacy than just the sin of slavery. There's more involved to these people, these people that are repelled as heroes, than the sin of slavery.

And to spit on these people, figuratively, by not even having any remote concern on their reaction, and perhaps even wanting them to be outraged, isn't that amongst great wickedness that we are seeing?

Well, I think it is, in this sense, though I think there would be a response, too, maybe on the same terms you've just articulated.

But, yes, I do think that there is a great deal of vengeance that seems to be mixed in, at least some of the comments that I've read and seen that have been made in media, social media.

But, very often they seem to be rooted in, we have suffered so long, and you didn't care about us, you didn't care about my ancestors, your ancestors didn't care about my ancestors, made us suffer, so now then it's your turn to suffer.

And so I see that kind of argument going, and people seem to think that that's legitimate. Again, the greater issue in my mind is just, we're a nation that is supposedly ruled by law.

We have a constitutional republic, and if the rule of law is going to obtain, then just laws must be enforced.

And we all ought to stand for them. People are upset now, some of the liberals are upset with the

ACLU because they're defending the right of these white supremacists, who

I think are vile and evil, they're defending their right to speak, which is, of course, what the

First Amendment is all about. And I applaud the ACLU for that. I would want to defend the right of others to speak as well.

I would not defend their right to violate the law, to break the law, just laws.

And so that's what I see happening here, is there's anarchy that is going to be the end result if we're not going to be ruled by law.

It will be ruled by might, or ruled by some type of cleverness, but we have said as a nation that we want to be a nation ruled by law.

And what we're seeing in these outbreaks of violence and lawless protest is an overthrow of that very foundational principle of our republic.

And we can't stay, you know, the nation won't last if that is allowed to go on unchecked. I was just reminded of when

I conducted an interview with Peter Littleback, president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

During this discussion, Dr. Littleback told me about something that I had not known prior to our interview, and it was in regard to George Washington's inner struggle in regard to slavery, and that he had frequently spoke of his wishes that the practice would become to an end.

And he inherited slaves, and at the end of his life, he made it clear in his will that his slaves be freed.

And he was the only slave -holding founding father of the

United States of America to do so. The reason why I brought that up is that when making these bold demands that monuments be torn down, and so far there's not a unanimous demand that Washington's monuments be torn down.

There is even disagreements over those on the left on that. But people have to really educate themselves in regard to these people whose memories they are trying to erase from the minds of Americans.

You know, they really have to know who they're talking about and who they're shouting out all kinds of hateful things in regard to.

They are probably, in most cases, slandering the memories of these people with certain things that are patently false.

Well, yeah, I think that's true. And yet, if they were to limit themselves to the things that are verifiably true, there is enough to find in the best, most virtuous of our heroes to protest.

And so the question again becomes, why? Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Why is this deemed in your mind a right and proper thing to do?

And you keep stripping that away. And what we'll discover is these protests are not against a culture, not against a historical figure.

These are protests against God. These are people shaking their fists in the face of God, saying,

I do not like the way you've run your world. And the problem is rebellion against our Creator.

And the only solution to that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. So that's why those of us who know

Christ, we can't afford to be sidetracked by these other issues.

I want to listen. I want to understand. I want to be sympathetic where it's appropriate. But I want to see clearly that what's really going on here is a protest against the

Creator. And the solution for that is coming to terms with your true condition as a rebel against your

Creator and the recognition that He has provided a way of reconciliation through His Son, the

Lord Jesus. And that is the only hope that any person has. To take the other side of the coin, to be more sensitive towards those who are demanding that these monuments be torn down, do we who are

Christians who may be against the removal of these monuments, do we have to not balance ourselves biblically with the fact that the

Apostle Paul, for instance, although he viewed eating meat that was sacrificed to an idol as being a benign thing, there was nothing sinful innately about it unless you were making your brother stumble as a result.

Should we remember that we need to be concerned about others who, even if they have an exaggerated understanding of certain monuments, as being equivalent to standing for nothing more than the subjugation of the black race, the cruel and inhuman treatment of the black race in this country, chattel slavery, and so on, that we have to be more patient and understanding in that regard because when it is all boiled down to its essence, we are arguing about stone and iron and wood here.

Exactly. Yeah, and that's where I think we've got to be careful and recognize when Paul is saying those things, he's not saying that the

Church is to be ruled by the weakest link. And so we find the weakest conscience and we make everybody bow to that.

That's not it at all. What he is saying is, look, you who are strong, bear with the weaker brethren for the purpose of helping them come to understand the truth and power of the gospel so that their conscience can be better shaped by that gospel and they can be set free from these things that bind them.

So it's not a coalesce to the weakest link. That's not it. But his spirit is amazing, isn't it?

I mean, Paul says, look, if eating meat caused my brother to sin, I'll never eat meat again. Well, where is that spirit in the

Christian Church today? It's a spirit of self -sacrifice, and this is how we're called to live, just like the

Lord Jesus, our Master, who gave His life. I mean, He gave up His life on the cross.

Our Master was voluntarily crucified, and if we're to be like Him, then that kind of crucified style should characterize our lives, and it should characterize how we engage these types of issues.

So that's why I said earlier that this is a matter of indifference to me, as you put it.

It's concrete and steel. I'm not going to get all exercised over that. I do want to try to look behind the issue that attacking those monuments presents to try to understand myself and help others to understand what's really going on here.

If we Christians get hung up on, well, they're trying to destroy the memory of Robert E.

Lee or smear a good man's reputation or whatever, if we get caught up in that, then most likely we're not going to get very far down the road of thinking according to the revelation of God in Christ and communicating what

God has done for us in Christ that really addresses the real and fundamental issue that is at stake.

I'm going to be taking our final break of the day, and when we return, I'd like you to give our audience some practical advice and counsel on how we can turn the disturbing news stories we are being flooded with daily over this issue, how we can turn these images and stories and reports into opportunities to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We're going to be going through our final break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.

Tom Nettles, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence. If you live outside of the

USA, you may remain anonymous. If it makes you feel more comfortable, if your question involves a personal or private issue.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the Pastor's Study every

Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio.

www .wlie540am .com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon

Eastern Time for A Visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back, and I have been rebuked in love by two people now.

One is my co -host, and one is from somebody in Florida who has informed me that I have called

Dr. Tom Askell, Dr. Tom Nettles, at least three times. I'm so sorry about that, brother.

Let me give you Tom Nettles' number. You call and apologize to him. There you go.

Yeah, well, I could only hope and pray that one day somebody would confuse me with Tom Nettles.

For our listeners, he is a mutual friend of Dr. Askell's and mine.

Again, as great a man as he is, I still apologize to you for the mix -up on at least several occasions.

I take it as a compliment, and that's no problem. Before we go into your advice, your practical advice and counsel about turning these things into opportunities in regard to the gospel, my co -host,

Reverend Buzz Taylor, has something to ask. Well, yeah, and I was just discussing with Chris during the break that it seems to me that this conversation wouldn't be complete if we didn't at least address the issue that many of the leftists are using this.

You're talking about there's no logic. Well, one of the logic things, if you want to call it that, is it's being used to show the utter moral failure of Donald Trump in this whole thing and, in fact, some even blaming him that it happened, which is preposterous.

But this seems to be what some of the political agenda is of this, is to denounce

Trump. I've seen things where because of his extreme moral failure on this issue he should be impeached and so forth.

You see it all online. Yeah, I do believe that's going on, too. Of course, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump.

I mean, I think he's an obviously overtly immoral man. He's the president of the United States, and so I want to honor him as that.

And I also want to speak the truth about him, and he has done far more good things than many people could have imagined in the short time that he's been in office as president.

When Cecil Richards, who is the president of the CEO of Planned Parenthood, says that this has been the worst few months in the history of Planned Parenthood because of Donald Trump, that is a major victory.

And so I want to acknowledge that. But I do think there are people that just want to get rid of him, would love to see more anarchy in our political process, and certainly there's a political agenda at play.

And I don't know how that will play out. I just know that Donald Trump has avoided and sidestepped and turned some of those attempts on their head multiple times, both through the campaign and in his short tenure as our president.

So I think it's a point well made. Well, now we can explore some advice and counsel that you have as a pastor, as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, on how we can turn these ugly events into opportunities for evangelism and proclaiming the gospel.

Many people, and I include myself in this, when we recoil in disgust in reaction to what somebody who may be on the polar opposite end of the spectrum, either theologically or ideologically, is doing, sometimes our vitriol and what we would think is our righteous indignation can overcome and even smother and eclipse the gospel.

And we don't use these things as an opportunity to spread the gospel, but we use them as an opportunity to declare our anger towards those with whom we disagree.

And perhaps you can help direct us in the right way. Well, yeah, I know that that's a tendency in my own heart and mind too.

I think about it and I want to do better at it. But in thinking about it, one of the most fundamental things we should remember is that we don't get to quit being

Christian just because we're caught up in a political issue that we feel deeply about and find ourselves at odds with other people about.

So we need to be Christian. We need to think Christianly. And one of the things that I think gets lost quickly,

Proverbs 18, 13 says that if a man gives an answer before he hears it, it's to his folly and shame.

And yet how many times do we see the first tweet or see the first headline and then start drawing out conclusions about things that happened as if we were omniscient?

You know, I know what happened at Charlottesville. Well, I know what took place in that. Well, we don't know.

And it just is utter folly for us to speak as if we did.

So one of the things I would say to brothers and sisters is that we need to tone down our rhetoric and we need to be humble and measured in our speaking about these kinds of issues, knowing that we're being manipulated just like everybody else is by the mainstream media and other media as well.

So we need to be very careful in making judgments. And whenever we speak, rather than speaking in absolutist terms about things that we do not absolutely know, we should speak in very measured terms.

So I've encouraged our folks not to speak rationally about these things, but if you want to voice your opinion, do so humbly and recognize that you don't have all the facts available to you.

Another thing is we must avoid being silent about matters of sin and righteousness that are public, on public display.

We need to be willing to say what the Bible says and not apologize for it. So I think that's another temptation

Christians have, is to just kind of go hide in a corner whenever we see immorality at the highest places or being spoken in emotional ways or even by a mob or threatening scene.

We need to be willing to stand and say, this is right, this is wrong. That's why, with everything else that I would grieve about regarding our president,

I have to say that President Trump told the truth when he said that there was violence on all sides in Charlottesville.

That has been vindicated by the police reports that have come out. And so he was just viscerated by the media when he made that statement, but he has proven to the spoken words that were true.

Maybe he didn't speak them as carefully as he should have, but they were true. So we need to be willing to not remain silent with matters of sin and righteousness.

But I do think we need to really go to school and working on thinking carefully about the gospel and the light the gospel sheds on our cultural tensions and divisions.

So if somebody is completely wrong -headed on this issue, and I'm convinced they're wrong -headed, and they're just responding emotionally, they don't make any sense,

I need to remember 1 Corinthians 4 -7. Who makes you to differ from one another? What do you have that you didn't receive?

If you received it, why do you boast as if you hadn't received it? So, okay, if this person is wrong -headed, then what makes me not wrong -headed?

It's God's grace. I need to remember where I came from. I used to be, by nature, a child of wrath, just like the rest of mankind, and I can't live as if that's not true.

One of the things that really gripped me watching some of the things that took place in Charlottesville was to see the anger of the white supremacists and to see their attempts to just do away with blacks and hating blacks.

And I looked at that, and I thought, man, that could be me. If it weren't for the grace of God, that would be me.

And it should shake us to recognize in the face of these kind of outbreaks of evil that except for God's grace, that would be us.

So if we keep that in mind, then we can talk, and we will talk humbly. We will talk not as people who've got everything figured out, not as people who've earned anything that we've attained, but people of grace.

And what we do, I think, again, is ask the questions. You know, why? Why do you think that way? Why do you feel that way?

What do you hope to have accomplished if your agenda were to be followed? And if you can help people to start thinking beyond the immediate visceral reaction to what it is that's driving it, if they're not believers, what's at the root, you'll always find, is this separation from God and this rebellion against God, which the

Scripture says is true of all people by nature. And once we can get that out in the light, then we can start addressing it.

Yeah, the world's not the way it's supposed to be in terms of righteousness, and you're not the way you're supposed to be.

I'm not the way I should be. And there's an answer. Jesus Christ came into the world for this very reason.

That's why we need a Savior. And the good news is God has provided a Savior, a complete Savior. And in Him, we find everything that we need.

And in reality, I think, everything our hearts actually do long for. And if we turn from sin, trust ourselves to Jesus Christ, we will be reconciled with God, we'll come to know our

Creator, and we will begin to be remade in the image of the only true sinless man who's ever lived.

So I think that's one avenue in on this whole issue. Amen. While I disagree with those who use newspaper headlines and television news reports and things they see on the

Internet regarding current events, I disapprove of the way they are molded into eschatological fulfillments of prophecy.

I do think that every day we see a reason on the news to point to people, that's why

Jesus Christ had to die in Calvary. Because everything involved in these situations, like for instance in this scenario, the very fact that slavery existed in the

United States is a reason, is a sin that Jesus Christ had to die in Calvary. The very reason why there are people on both sides of the spectrum of ideology involved in these riots and other violent activities is because that's another reason that Jesus Christ needed to die in Calvary.

It's because men could never earn their favor with God by anything good within us.

We are all guilty of sin and deserving of the wrath of God and deserving of eternity in hell.

But thanks be to God he sent his son to die on Calvary to redeem his people who otherwise would have spent eternity in hell and he received the wrath of the

Father upon himself and turned it away from us and rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures and that is the only hope any human has for eternal life.

And we've got to live like that, we've got to remember that and think, okay, what do people who really believe that, what are they like?

What should they be like? How should they treat others? If we can keep that, keep reminding each other of that,

I think it will go a long way to disarming some people who think that we look upon them as our enemies when in reality we don't or we shouldn't and we should see them as being in the same position we once were and would be apart from the grace of God.

BB in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania asks, I don't know if you covered this already, but shouldn't we

Christians be willing to eat the meat and spit out the bones when it comes to valuable heroic figures of the past who, as we all, are guilty of sin and not only the sin that involves slavery or racism but we can think of people like Martin Luther, for instance, who said some very cruel and anti -Semitic things in his own life.

Don't we need to, instead of totally throwing out the baby with the bath water, shouldn't we be absorbing the truth that these great men of God, these great yet faltered and sinful men of God in certain aspects, in order to receive the gifts that God has given to us for all perpetual generations until we're in glory because God has certainly used these men to bring countless thousands to eternal life in Christ?

Well, yes. We did talk about that earlier and I would just say yes to that. We recognize that even very flawed people can speak very true things and can point us in the right direction.

So we appreciate whatever is good and true that's according to God's word without using that as any justification for the sin in the one who might have pointed us to what's good and true.

How do you respond, if at all, I don't know if this has ever come up in your life, but how do you respond to some of our

Messianic Jewish brethren who would say, how dare you make use of Martin Luther's writings and laud him as a

Christian hero when he said things that even Hitler and the

Nazis made use of to bolster their own hatred and eventually used to create the final solution, the concentration camps where millions of Jews were led to their slaughter.

How do you respond to a brother in Christ who says, how can you even associate

Martin Luther with the gospel? Well, again, it's the exact same principle,

I think. I would never justify any of Luther's sinful actions or sinful writings.

But if he spoke things that are true to the word of God, then I want to benefit from that without feeling any compulsion.

That means I've got to justify everything that the man said or did. If we're going to do that, then we're not going to read the

New Testament. We're not going to read the letters of Paul, because people took some things that Paul said and twisted them, distorted them to their own destruction.

If that's going to be the standard, that a man must be sinless, a person must be sinless, before we're willing to affirm anything that he or she taught, then we're using a standard other than the

Bible. And what I want to do is be as completely biblical as I can be, which means, yes, if Luther said something that is right, good, and true, that we are justified by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone,

I say amen to that. And when he goes on his rants about the Jews and his policies of how they ought to be treated,

I say those are wicked ideas. They are wrong and contrary to the word of God. And I don't feel like that's a major tension whatsoever.

And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to ask. Well, I can hear our listeners thinking that, okay, things like this happen and nobody's doing anything about it.

And you're mentioning that the gospel is the solution. Of course, I understand that. I've said many times, look in the mirror.

There's the solution to the world's problems. Not only the cause of them, but the solution to them. You look at yourself as the solution to the world's problems?

As part of the body of Christ, absolutely, yes. Fortunately, not alone.

But as individuals, as church members, we're confronted with all these things. What practically do you think we should be doing?

Well, one thing we certainly ought to be doing is reaching out beyond our own comfort zones, which tend to be racially bound.

Not always, but they do tend to be that way. And so if you live in a neighborhood or an area that's predominantly one race versus other races, it's going to be difficult to have a multiracial church.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have friendships with and fellowship with those that are different from us racially, ethnically, even linguistically.

We can overcome that today in so many ways through technology. So one of the things that I've benefited from is just listening to the members of our church who are from minority backgrounds and cultures racially and ethnically.

And there have been occasions I've called some of them and just said, hey, tell me what you're thinking about what's going on right now, and how does this affect you?

I did that a few years ago in the midst of, I think it was after the

Dallas policemen were shot and it was right in the middle of a lot of fomenting of these racial tensions again with the

Black Lives Matter movement. And so I called several of our African American members and said,

I just want to listen to you. I'm trying to figure out what to think and how to think about this. And it was very helpful for me, and more than one told me that they appreciated the fact that I was interested and wanted to know what they were thinking.

One of the things I discovered is everyone that I talked to had experienced various degrees of racial prejudice from being followed in department stores to being followed in their cars, going home from work until they got on an isolated part of the highway by policemen, and then only in the isolated areas the lights come on, them being pulled over.

I mean, I heard story after story like that. And that's never happened to me because of the color of my skin that I know of.

And I haven't had to live with that kind of reality. And so that makes me sympathetic and it makes me realize, okay, the way that they're experiencing the world and the things that they've had to deal with and do deal with are different in some respects than the things

I've had to experience and have to deal with. What I want to fight for, though, is that what we have in Christ trumps all of that.

And my identity should not be primarily determined by the amount of melanin

I have in my skin. My identity should be determined by my relationship to God through Jesus Christ.

And if that's true, and if that's true for others, then it doesn't matter our ethnicities.

It doesn't matter the color of our skin. Yeah, we all have baggage. We all have issues that we have to work through. But those experiences don't trump what we have in common.

And so we ought to be able to sit down with a Bible open and try to understand what's going on, try to understand each other's perspectives, help each other where we have the blind spots, and challenge each other to think more carefully from God's Word.

And I benefit from that. I want to be useful in that as well. But I do think that's one thing that we could do.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, you know, that 11 o 'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, and it's probably still true.

And in some ways, you know, it may be the reality of the neighborhood your church is in, but we can certainly reach beyond that and not let a person's skin color or ethnic heritage be a barrier to trying to bring the gospel to them or fellowshipping with them if they know

Christ as we know Christ. I have a friend who is now in eternity with Christ.

I don't know if you ever have heard of him or met him, but his name was

Dr. Robert J. Cameron. And Dr. Robert J. Cameron was at one time a

Reformed Episcopal minister who later became a PCA minister and then finally became an

OPC minister. But he was a minority in all three of those denominations because he was black.

And he was a very dear friend of mine. I encouraged my church back in the 1980s to invite him to preach at a conference at the church where I was a member.

Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville was the name of it at that time, which later became Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick.

But I encouraged my congregation to reach out to the black community because we were a predominantly white church, very predominantly white church, right in the heart of a very black community.

And I said, this doesn't reflect our community at all. It's ridiculous. We have to really do more aggressive outreach.

And we had this conference, and we put up flyers with Dr. Cameron's photo on them.

And we wound up getting a lot of people to visit the church. And many from the black community wound up remaining there for decades and became members and so on.

But Dr. Cameron was quite a controversial brother in Christ because he, in fact, wrote a book really after my urging him to do so.

He wrote a book on the sin of racism called The Last Pew on the Left. And he titled it that because that's where he was forced to sit growing up in the

South as a Roman Catholic at that time before he became a Reformed Protestant. He was raised in Catholicism, had to sit in the last pew on the left.

He wrote this book about the sin of racism. And the reason why it was so controversial is that he dared to lay the charge of racism not only and exclusively against his white brothers in Christ, but against his black brothers in Christ equally, so much so that a major Christian publisher, if I were to mention the name, you would immediately, instantly recognize the name of the publisher.

They responded to his manuscript with a letter that he read to me,

Dr. Cameron read to me, and said that his manuscript was the finest unsolicited manuscript they had ever received, but they felt uncomfortable publishing a book that dared to criticize the black

Christian church. And this was something that disturbed

Dr. Cameron greatly. Do you have any words to those of our, not only our black brothers and sisters in Christ, but even just in the general community?

There exists among some of them a racial hatred towards whites that they believe they are entitled to because they have been historically a persecuted people.

And I immediately think of the fact that racism is brought up in the New Testament as a very serious sin, but it was the racism of the

Jews against the Gentiles that is brought up in Scripture primarily, and they were a persecuted people, and it did not entitle them to a hatred of those of another race.

Could you comment on what I just said? Yeah, amen. I agree with it. I think Ephesians 2, we need to spend a lot of time thinking about what

Paul writes there, how Christ has destroyed the dividing wall of hostility.

And how dare we let it be built back up by our actions, our words, our inactions, or our silence.

You know, I came across an article earlier this week that just humbled me and made me rejoice, convicted me.

It's written by a black brother. I've never met him. His name is Daryl B. Harrison, and he writes a blog called

Just Thinking for Myself. He's a former military guy. I think maybe he's a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.

He's a part of a black theological leadership institute there at Princeton. But he lives in Georgia.

He's a member of Reformed Baptist Church in Georgia now. I think he said he was the first deacon at the

First Baptist Church of Covington, Georgia, where he attended several years ago, first black deacon that that church had ever had.

Well, he wrote this article. Let me just read you the title and encourage you to go read it. It's called Is the

Gospel No Longer Enough for Black Christians? It's one of the most eloquent and finely reasoned articles on this whole issue

I've read. And again, I was humbled. I was challenged, convicted, and caused to rejoice, to back up and think again.

Yeah, that's right. We have Christ. He quotes the earliest black published author in America.

And he was a poet. And he quotes him in an article that he wrote or a speech that he gave.

And he advocates, he says, you know, people are agitating for liberty today. He says, I hope, in the language of the day, he says,

I hope the young Negroes get liberty. We need civil liberty. He said, but we're all slaves to sin, and we need spiritual liberty more than anything.

And I was just moved. I kept asking myself, where's this attitude today? Not just in the black church or black

Christians, but of all races. Shouldn't this be true of all of us? I think it was a fine apologetic for coming back to first principles that men, brothers and sisters, we are

Christians first and foremost. We've been bought with a price. We ought to live like it. We ought to act like people who've been purchased by the blood of God's Son.

So I would commend that to you. Just a great article. Darrell Harrison, Is the

Gospel No Longer Enough for Black Christians? And how do you spell Darrell? Because I know it's spelled in many ways.

D -A -R -R -E -L -L. Okay. I will definitely look that up. Maybe I'll get, God willing,

Darrell on the program. Don't you think also in regard to realistic, genuine dialogue and friendship that people of different races should cultivate and maintain, that there can't be this fear factor where we have to walk on eggshells, so terrified that we're going to parse our words incorrectly in defiance of political correctness and be viewed as racist.

Don't those of minority races have to be careful not to slander, either in open speech or in their minds and hearts, all white people as being guilty of racism and their motivations, when, of course, it would be just as evil if white people, in fact many white people do, automatically assume that when they see a black person they are not to be trusted, they're going to steal something, all those kinds of evil thoughts.

Isn't the charge of racism against whites unilaterally something that is slanderous and needs to stop as well?

Well, I'll just put it like this, that racism is not limited to any one race.

That sin is not limited to any one race. We're all capable of it. We all have the seeds of bigotry and racism in our own hearts.

And I do think conversation gets shut down, as I saw it this week, from someone who says, well, if you don't understand, then

I just can't explain it to you. There's no help for you. Well, when somebody says that based upon some kind of racial identity, then they're not thinking like Christians.

And if my skin tone keeps me from understanding the Bible, or causes me to understand it wrongly or more rightly than others, then the

Bible's not true. And so I think we've all got to get over that. And I do have friends, I'm grateful I have friends of different ethnicities that I can speak as openly and freely to, and they feel the same with me,

I believe. And we can push back on each other. I wish that were true across the board, but it's not.

I have friends and acquaintances who are white, I have friends and acquaintances who are black, that I do not feel that same kind of freedom with.

And maybe it's a commentary on me, but I can tell you this, I do get the impression at times that what is going on is what my friend

Bodie Baucom calls an ethnic Gnosticism. It says, if you're not my skin color, then you just simply cannot know and understand.

And when I pick that up, the conversation's over for me. And I don't want to be guilty of that myself, but I just think it is a killer to any kind of genuine

Christian fellowship. Amen, and I'm looking forward to seeing Bodie Baucom and Dr. Tom Askell at the

G3 Conference this January 18th through the 20th in Atlanta, Georgia. Don't forget to go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com to register. And I know that your website for Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida is truegraceofgod .org,

truegraceofgod .org. And the Founders' website is founders .org,

founders .org. Any other contact information you care to give, Dr. Askell? Well, I think those are the biggies, and let me just remind your listeners too that October 3rd through 5th, we have a

Founders' Conference scheduled in Memphis, Tennessee. Jeff Thomas is coming over to preach. I encourage your listeners to go check that out.

It's Reformation truth now and forever. Amen. Well, I'm going to try to make it to that myself if I can. Well, I want to thank you so much,

Dr. Askell. If you wouldn't mind holding on the line, because I'd like to schedule another interview with you. Okay. And I want to thank you so much for being a part of our program today, and you as well,

Reverend Buzz Taylor, thanks for being on. Thank you so much. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

Well, I hope that you all have a safe and God -glorifying weekend and Lord's Day. Look forward to hearing from you with your questions next week, and I hope that you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater