July 5, 2021 Show with Bill Ascol & Dusty Deevers on “The Southern Baptist Convention Abortion Abolition Resolution”

The Radio Program Opens and the Host Frames the Day’s Topic

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

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 Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this fifth day of July 2021.

I trust everyone listening has had a blessed and refreshing and relaxing time to celebrate Independence Day with your family, friends, and loved ones over the weekend. And in fact, that may be going on right now since many people have a day off from work on the Monday after the 4th of July.

But today we have a very important discussion. I believe all of our discussions on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio are important, but this is really vital involving the rescue of unborn children, the attempts by God's grace and mercy to bring an end to the horror and the satanic blight on this country and the globe known as infanticide, or in the more cleaned up version known as abortion.

Today we are going to be discussing the Southern Baptist Abortion Abolition Resolution that was co-authored by my guests, Bill Askill, senior pastor of Beth-El Baptist Church in Owasso, Oklahoma, and also Dusty Devers, a pastor of Grace Community Church of Elgin, Oklahoma.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you two brothers to the program for the very first time.

Welcome.

Thank you.

It's good to be with you today. We appreciate all that you do. Great.

And Pastor Bill, if you could first let our listeners know about Beth-El Baptist Church in Owasso, Oklahoma.

Okay. I have been a pastor of Beth-El in my 16th year here. We're located just north of Tulsa, so up in the northeast corner of the state. It's a wonderful family of faith. Taking the gospel to our neighborhood and to the nations.

I have the privilege of serving these folks. They've been with me for all these years, but precious people. They love the Lord. They love the lost. And they're all on board with this initiative that we began here in Oklahoma a few years ago to see abortion abolished.

Well, if anybody wants more information about Beth-El Baptist Church of Owasso, Oklahoma, go to Bethelowasso .org, B-E-T-H-E-L-O-W-A-S-S-O dot org. Now, if we could, Dusty Devers, if you could give our listeners a summary description of Grace Community Church of Elgin, Oklahoma.

Well, Grace Community Church is a Reformed Baptist church. We planted it five years ago in May. And it was formerly First Baptist Church of Elgin. And we did what I call a Revita plant. We did a revitalization with the church plant.

We have three elders, three pastors that I labor with. And the body has just been so kind and generous to receive the word implanted. And they have been earnest to receive the word. So just a wonderful church, a wonderful community of faith.

And I just thank God every day that I get to be alongside these brothers and sisters in our declaring the glory and supremacy of King Jesus.

Amen.

And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that the only website you have is your Facebook page, correct?

Yeah, right now. We're updating our website.

OK.

Well, for right now, go to Grace Community Church Elgin, E-L-G-I-N on Facebook, and you'll find that page. And Brother Bill, if I'm not mistaken, you are the brother of my dear friend of many years, Tom Askew, the president of Founders Ministries, correct?

That's correct. Tom and I started Founders Ministries back in 1983, and I was on the board for a while. I went off the board. I'm back on the board now. Tom's a wonderful man of God.

Yes, he is. And I look forward to having him back on the show. Well, tell us about the recent Southern Baptist Convention meeting. We had a full program on that recently with my dear friend Pastor Josh Bice, who is founder of G3 Ministries.

He gave us a very detailed description of what occurred. But if you folks, both of you, and perhaps we'll start with Dusty, can give us a description of what occurred as far as the Southern Baptist for Abolishing Abortion is concerned.

The Southern Baptist Convention Resolution on Abolishing Abortion

Well, we had a plan going into the annual meeting this year to present the resolution on abolishing abortion. We put together about a year prior to, had several readers and contributors look at several theologians and pastors and authors and scholars and put together what we feel like is a God honoring, Christ exalting, church benefiting, and pre-born neighbor fighting for their lives resolution.

And as our strategy going into the annual meeting was that we would pass out hopefully around 7 ,500 copies of the resolution on abolishing abortion. We had another booklet written by my good friend James Silberman with Free the States called Are You an Abolitionist?

And we passed out a lot of those at the Founders Breakfast, at the Founders event the day before on that Monday, and then we were able to pass out 1 ,000 copies at the Conservative Baptist Network Breakfast.

And then we had several folks on the streets passing out the resolutions. We did some street preaching as well, but we weren't involved with, there was another group that was out there that kind of Westboro type radicals.

We weren't involved with them. But going into the annual meeting, we were concerned that we might not be able to have a hearing with our resolution, and so that's why we wanted to have a good ground game, get the information out.

And really our ultimate goal was to glorify God in everything that we did and to ensure that the resolution would be read by folks so that they could see what God's Word says about ending this holocaust in our land of abortion.

And so we had a lot of folks who had read it. The messengers, I think, were ready. You know, most messengers are just like us. They read their Bibles and they eagerly want to receive God's Word and to study it and see if these things are true from God's Word.

And so the resolutions committee on that Tuesday didn't bring our resolution out, and so Brother Bill here made an amendment to bring it out. I don't know if you want to go in depth in that right now, but they did bring it out, and the messengers voted probably 90 percent or more in favor of hearing the resolution, and so that was heard on Wednesday.

And there was some debate that ensued and a single insignificant change was made, and it was passed by the messengers this year. So it was, I'd say, a pretty successful thing that happened. And it's God's grace on us as a convention to call us to address the most urgent and horrific holocaust in our world right now.

Over 3 ,000 babies are murdered every day in the United States and over 150 ,000 around the world every day. I'd say it's very urgent.

Bill, if you could, explain specifically what are the main details that were involved in this, and what does it mean, as far as Dusty just said, what does it mean that the Southern Baptist for Abolishing Abortion was accepted by a vote?

What does that mean?

That's a good question, Chris. In our convention bylaws, when we get together for our annual meeting, the platform people actually are in charge of the convention. Whoever's on the platform for their particular responsibilities are in charge.

And so there's a resolutions committee that's appointed by the president. J .D. Greer was the outgoing president. He'd appoint a resolutions committee, and they go through resolutions. We're required to submit a resolution to this committee no later than May 31st.

They look over them, and then they decide, of all the resolutions presented, which ones they're going to bring to the convention for consideration. As Dusty said, ours was not brought out, and we were suspicious that that would happen, and that's why we went ahead and took sort of a preemptive strike to be sure that messengers had an opportunity to read ours.

And so when the time came for a resolution to be presented, ours was not listed in the daily bulletin, and so at the right time, I had already reached out to the parliamentarian prior to the convention to make sure that my thinking was clear on parliamentary procedure if indeed our resolution was not presented.

And so at the right time, I was given an opportunity to speak, and I asked for the president to allow me to make a motion to bring the resolution out of committee that would require a two-thirds vote of the messengers to overrule the decision of the resolutions committee.

And so I was allowed to speak to that. As Dusty said, the messengers voted probably close to 90 to bring it out. That's historic. I've been going to Southern Baptist Convention meetings since 1979. I talked to my favorite convention historian, Dr. Tom Meadows, asked him had he ever known of this happening, and he said he did not know of this happening, where a resolution was brought out over the protest of the committee.

So we got it before the floor of the convention. As Dusty said, there was a little debate the next day. It was adopted by the convention, so for the first time in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, two things happened.

One was the resolutions committee was overruled. Second, a strong resolution using the language of abolition was adopted by the convention. I may need to add, I'd like to add, resolutions are not in the form of business motions where something changes at an entity level.

A resolution is a snapshot of the disposition of the messengers at that particular annual meeting, but it does show the pulse of the convention. So while if we, if you have to get on the phone, Chris, and start calling around to the six seminaries, call the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and say, what are you going to do in the light of the resolution on abolishing abortion?

They could say if they wanted to, well, we do not respond to resolutions. But Southern Baptists have spoken on this. The discussion of abolition is on the table. It's not going away. And even since the convention, momentum is building on the part of grassroots Southern Baptists to see our institutions and agencies take a more proactive stand, because we believe the secular pro-life industry has failed us, and at root has no intention of seeing abortion abolished.

Abolitionism Versus the Pro-Life Movement

Now, you brought up something very important. Many of us will routinely use the phrase pro-life as merely a generic description that we are opposed to the murder of unborn children. And it's obviously, as you know, has escalated to such a satanic level that there are elected officials who actually believe it is not only acceptable to murder an unborn child up until the ninth month, but also they think it is completely acceptable for a baby who has been born quote, quote, accidentally during an abortion attempt, they think it's absolutely acceptable for a mother and her doctor to decide whether that baby who has been born, whether or not that child lives or dies.

So many people, I even use it often as a part of the vernacular, describe myself as pro-life. What is the difference between the quote, quote, pro-life movement and what you are saying? I guess we'll start with Dusty.

Yeah, I think fundamentally, we're saying abolitionism, whether you're talking about slavery abolitionism or the abolition of abortion, abolitionism simply asks, how does God, through his word, command the bride of Christ to address and combat the great evil of unjustified premeditated murder of pre-born humans in our society?

Now, you can ask that about slavery, you can ask that about any number of evils, but abolitionists are firmly grounded and planted in God's word and are answering the question of dealing with great societal evils in our society.

This one particularly, we call ourselves abortion abolitionists. Our answer on how you deal with it is to officially cease murdering the pre-born immediately without exceptions that legalize murder or compromises with the culture of death.

So the big difference between abolitionism and pro-life-ism as an industry or as a kind of professional movement that it has become is that abolitionism fundamentally is a biblical response to great evils, and it is the work of the people of God.

We talk about the five tenets of abolitionism. When you say it's gospel-centered, it's aligned providentially, it's through the church, it's engaged biblically, and it's sought immediately without exception or compromise.

Pro-life regulationism for the past 48 years has sought to regulate murder, not stand where God's word stands, but to regulate it. And for 48 years, we've been playing on a football field without any end zones that is coached, not by God's word, but by a humanist worldview.

Now that's not to say that many pro-lifers aren't doing what they believe is all that they can do or what God demands. It's that we can be participating in something unintentionally and unintentionally be wrong.

So, pro-lifism basically submits to Roe versus Wade as the ultimate authority, and so we can't do anything because SCOTUS, the Supreme Court, hasn't given us permission. And abolitionists say, well, Jesus is king over all the universe, and he is the one who has all rule and authority and power and dominion and has a name that's above all names, and he is putting everything under his feet, and he's doing that as he is the head of the church.

And so, the church is to be responding to these great societal evils as God commands, not as the Supreme Court commands. The Supreme Court is supposed to be bowing to King Jesus as well. So, I know that was a lot there, but in essence, it's saying, how does God demand we deal with murder and these great evils of aborting and murdering our children?

And so, let's do what he says and not regulate the slaughter of the pre-born in our land.

Chris, also, I would add, like you, I would have identified myself as pro-life. I've been in this battle since I pastored in Louisiana decades ago, and I would have called myself at that point a principled pro-lifer.

In other words, I was working for legislation with our Louisiana legislature, a no exceptions bill. We were working on that, a clean bill. A constitutional attorney at LSU in Baton Rouge taught us that the only thing that has any hope of standing up before the Supreme Court is a bill that doesn't have any exceptions.

It's equal protection, equal justice for every human being born and pre-born. So, I was in that arena and for the longest would have called myself a pro-lifer, a principled pro-lifer. Then I began to bump into pragmatic pro-lifers, people who would say to me, well, what you're trying to do is good, but it's just not possible.

It's never going to work. There was the pragmatism, and that frustrated me. So, I had to just distinguish myself. Well, I'm a principled pro-lifer. And then I began to bump into political pro-lifers, these politicians who kept getting elected, reelected, promising to end abortion, vote for me, support my campaign, we'll end abortion.

And time and time again, it never happened. And then there was the ugliest animal in this whole pro-life industry, was the professional pro-lifer. He has a fundraising list. He makes millions and millions of dollars off of good-hearted people, promising that if you'll support his cause, he'll lobby the legislature, he'll lobby the Congress.

So that abortion can be ended.

Well, I'm not playing the game anymore. So, a couple of years ago, I came out as an avowed abolitionist. I would say to anybody listening to your broadcast that identifies himself as pro-life, leave the pro-life movement, join the biblical movement of abolition.

Dusty, I think, is the one who coined the phrase, Plexit, pro-life exit, get out of it. And so, that's a distinction. That's a very real distinction. And we're pressing for that in the Southern Baptist Convention.

It's not been well received by the elitists and the gatekeepers, but they need to get in line with the ranking file of Southern Baptist or else.

When it comes to Roe versus Wade, I have heard disagreement over this, but is this actually a constitutional, legally binding liberty that women have, giving them the so-called freedom to marry their unborn children?

No. No, it's not. We have a separation of powers in our constitutional republic. The Supreme Court does not write law. It renders decisions. It renders bad decisions. Dred Scott was a horrible decision.

Roe v. Wade, a horrible decision. Obergefell, horrible decisions. And the people of this land are not obligated. I get so tired, Chris, of hearing people say, well, Roe v. Wade is the law of the land.

No, it's not the law of the land. Congress has never passed a law that allows for the slaughter of unborn children. And so we need to rip the mask off of that lie. And as we say in Oklahoma, Oklahoma is a wonderful place to live.

When the day comes and we get our legislature to act like men and godly women and pass an abortion, an abolition bill, then we will say to, and our governor signs it, we will say to the Supreme Court, you can pound sand.

You don't get to tell us who we kill, when, where, how, and why in our state.

Yeah, Chris, you know, the Supreme Court has overturned itself over 300 times. It makes decisions that must be overturned. And besides that, you know, states have the right to stand up, and not only the right, the responsibility and the command, according to their constitutions, to stand up, to interpose on behalf of their citizens when the federal magistrate would do something to harm their civil liberties or their life.

You know, this is fifth grade civics. We learned that the Supreme Court doesn't make laws. And so, we have been bowing to an opinion, which we would call, according to Isaiah 10, 1, and 2, an iniquitous decree that promoted and made way for the shedding of millions of babies' blood.

We would call that an iniquitous decree, and it shouldn't be recognized as law. It isn't. But we're, in all these states now, writing pro-life regulation bills that actually legalize, they give legal cover to the murder of our pre-born neighbors, God's image bearers.

So, bills like heartbeat bills, for example, there's a positive and a negative side to pro-life regulation laws. A heartbeat law. The positive side is, well, you can't murder children if the abortionist goes in and finds a heartbeat.

But the negative side of that bill is, if he doesn't find a heartbeat, you can murder.

Him.

You can murder this baby. And God's word demands that we not be partial. Pro-life regulation laws are inherently bills of partiality. They have a positive side and a negative side. They say that some can be murdered.

This is not establishing equal justice and equal protection as God demands in His world. This is not seeking first the kingdom of heaven. This is using unequal weights and measures. So, this is the reality with all these pro-life regulation laws.

The Supreme Court didn't make a law and didn't codify into our Constitution that abortion was legal. What is actually codifying it into law is all these states writing pro-life regulation bills. That's where the legalization of abortion has been happening.

Now, whenever we talk about ignoring Roe v. Wade or nullifying Roe v. Wade, and we talk about that with regard to abortion abolitionism just in the same way that some folks would talk about it with gun rights or immigration or marijuana.

In Oklahoma, we have ignored the Fed on marijuana. It's a schedule one drug and in Oklahoma, we have legalized it for medical purposes. So, the reality is in Oklahoma, we have a super majority pro-life legislature and we can pass any pro-life bill we want.

We can even pass a law that says we are going to ignore the Fed on marijuana, but they won't go in and pass an abolition bill that ignores Roe v. Wade and challenges them like they have challenged them on marijuana.

So, in essence, every time we see a green cross when we're driving down the road and there are pot shops everywhere in our state, we're saying that our legislators in some way love marijuana more than they do the pre-born babies in our state.

And it should be interesting to our listeners to know that, and this is not a matter of opinion, the real Roe, the real woman who launched the Roe v. Wade decision, Norma McCorvey, later admitted that it was all a lie and she is pro-life.

I don't know if she is still with us, perhaps you guys know, but I just thought that might be an interesting bit of fact for our listeners to know.

She did pass away fairly recently, and not only what you just said about Norma McCorvey, but she, the whole case was built upon a lie. It was propagated upon a lie. Roe v. Wade has come straight out of the pit of hell.

It needs to be sent back to hell where it came from. Our pro-life friends like to tell us that our abolition position, if successful, will undo all the gains they have made, and yet in Oklahoma, as Dusty pointed out, a super majority pro-life Republican conservative legislature will pass law after law after law every session.

They high-five themselves, they slap themselves on the back with all these victories, and yet abortion is on the rise in the state of Oklahoma. And so 48 years of pro-life legislation has only lulled us into a stupor of death.

And I say it's time for us to take a different path, take a biblical path. Trust the Lord when he says, him who honors me, I will honor. He who despises me, I will esteem lightly. I think we're on the clear side of that right now, Chris.

Our nation is. I believe the Southern Baptist Convention is. We have despised God. We've looked at unequal rates and measures. We've looked at pragmatic approaches, and God is not honoring that. He's not blessing that.

But I really believe that he will bless a group of people who will stand and say, no more, no more. We call upon the federal government to abolish abortion immediately, without exception or compromise.

If the federal government will not hear, we call upon our state legislatures to do that. And once that is enacted, and all it's going to take is one state to finally get it right, dig its heels in, the governor sign it, as one of our good friends in this movement likes to say, what's the Supreme Court going to do if a state passes an abolition bill?

Are they going to send their army? The Supreme Court doesn't have an army. And so it's going to be a crisis when it comes, but it will finally set things right. And when other states see that it's possible to protect your citizens from the devilish grip of the Supreme Court, the dominoes are going to start falling.

I had a note the other day from a young man in the aftermath of the Southern Baptist Convention who said, I did not even know abolition was a possibility until I heard Bill Askell speak at the convention.

Okay, we have to go to our first break right now. And so please, if you have a question for our guest today, send it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

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Go to nasbible .com. That's nasbible .com to place your order. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, we are discussing something very important today in regard to the prevention of the murder of unborn children or infanticide.

We are discussing the Southern Baptist Abortion Abolition Resolution with my guests who are the co-author of that resolution. Bill Askle, Senior Pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Owasso, Oklahoma. And Dusty Devers, Pastor at Grace Community Church of Elgin, Oklahoma.

If you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Chrisarnzen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

And we have a first-time questioner, Cody from Bowie, Texas. What can a layman or elder do in regards to the recent plagiarism issues that have come to light in the Southern Baptist Convention to hold the new president accountable or call for his resignation from the Southern Baptist Convention presidency or ministry altogether?

Are there any standards in the Southern Baptist Convention regarding plagiarism? Considering it appears J .D. Greer is now guilty of it also. Obviously, this is going to be something that requires a little bit of explanation.

So if, Dusty, if you could give a little background on that, because the issue of plagiarism is something we haven't addressed yet, but we did address it with Josh Bice the last time he was on.

Plagiarism, Moral Credibility, and Accountability in the SBC

Yeah, I hate to get too far off a field of our topic on abortion and abolition, but just briefly, I would say, in catching up, it appears that, well, not appears, it's been proven that Ed Litton, the recently elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, plagiarized J .D. Greer, at least, in several of his Romans series sermons, and when it was brought to his attention and it was exposed, he pulled down over 140 sermons from his website, and there's been a lot of comparative videos made between words that he directly, I mean, you could say plagiarized from J .D. Greer.

I'm sure that there will be more evidence come out as people have the time to mine the resources. You know, I went to seminary at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. If I would have plagiarized in any of my papers, at the least, I would have failed that particular assignment and may have been kicked out of seminary for theft of intellectual property, and for, really, it's a character qualification issue.

I wouldn't be qualified according to the qualifications of pastoring 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 if I was stealing other people's intellectual property and not making reference to them, at least in some way to where I acquired it.

Our blackboard system where we had to turn in our papers was used particularly because it could scour all kinds of journals and other resources and Google Books and otherwise to check for plagiarism, and it appears that our president of the SBC is now doing this, and there are so many people who are trying to support or just lessen the impact of what that is.

I think the heart of a pastor is to shepherd the flock of God that's before him, knowing that we have to give an account for the kind of watch care we give over those particular sheep. You can't say that you're faithfully doing that.

So, if I was in our church, we were talking about how to respond with an SBC that I think is clearly morally compromised since we haven't already spoken out on these issues, and our academic elites and the heads of our seminaries and our entities have not clearly spoken out on the things that they wouldn't even allow in their classrooms, and now they're allowing for, in some ways, at least tacitly from our SBC president.

By the way, Brother Askell, if you could make sure that you mute yourself every time you're not speaking because there's still a lot of feedback.

All right. I surely will.

But I will ask you the follow-up question from our listener Cody in Bowie, Texas. Why is the question never asked in the Southern Baptist Convention, are women who have abortions guilty of murder? That seems to be the issue in the Roman Catholic Church as well, and I would argue is the reason the pro-life movement has failed at abolition.