121. Postmillennialism and Politics (My Interview with Joe Boot)

When you look at all of scripture through the lens of the gospel of the kingdom, it was for me, it was like being handed a new Bible. Suddenly the word of God started to come into focus. So rather than being blurry around the edges, suddenly it was like it came into real focus.

It became sharp for me.

Introduction to a Practical Postmillennialism Interview

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 121, Postmillennialism and Politics, my interview with Joe Boot. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back.

Today was actually supposed to be part two of a two-part little mini series that I'm doing within the main series called A Practical Postmillennialism. If you remember last week, we talked about the end of the old world.

This week, we were gonna talk about the beginning of the new world, but I had to postpone that until next week. The reason is I was traveling and I didn't get it quite finished, and I want it to be excellent.

I want this channel to have excellent content, which is why I'm bringing you one of my favorite interviews that I've done so far. It is with Dr. Joe Boot, and it is phenomenal. And it's actually really timely because we're going into a season right now of political craziness.

Like I've been through several elections at this point. I'm 40 years old, and I cannot remember a time where it was more crazy than it is today. So today, we're gonna be talking to Joe Boot about the intersection between postmillennialism and politics.

Should Christians be involved politically? Should we be involved socially? Should we be involved in our world? We're gonna answer that question next. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

It's a very special episode where we're getting to talk to Dr. Joe Boot about the intersection between postmillennialism and cultural engagement. Have you been in this series for a little while? You'll know that we've been talking about a practical postmillennialism.

And what I mean by that is what is postmillennialism in a way that everybody can understand? These big theological terms sometimes can be intimidating. So what we've been doing is we've been going through the entire Bible, looking at what postmillennialism is, looking how the Bible has an optimistic view of our future and of the victory of Christ.

And along the way, we've been talking to experts in their particular field. We're talking to people who know about the arts or music or literature, education, now politics and cultural engagement. And we wanna see how an optimistic view of Jesus's reign impacts the way that we live in all of these various sectors of life.

So we wanna make it practical. Now today, I'm so excited to be talking to a new friend of mine. We literally just introduced ourselves, Dr. Joe Boot. His books have been a real source of encouragement to me.

His big book, The Mission of God, I recommend it to anybody who's watching today. It's excellent and it covers so much ground. Really one of the most impactful books that I've read on this topic. So I commend that to you.

Also his smaller book, Ruler of Kings is great as well. Other than that introduction, brother, tell us what you're doing at the Ezra Institute, what you're doing, are you writing? What's going on in your world?

Tell us a little bit about you.

The Ezra Institute and Cultural Apologetics

Thanks, Kendall. Well, it's great to be on your show. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the Ezra Institute is a worldview and cultural apologetics think tank. And we do training as well as sort of engagement, cultural engagement with unbelievers.

We do training and equipping for believers in biblical worldview. And we have an office in the US, in Tennessee, our head office in Chattanooga, just outside of Toronto in Canada and in the UK as well.

And I'm based in the UK, in our UK office. I founded the Ezra Institute in 2009. And I have to sort of bounce between our three locations for our various events and so on. So we have a podcast, the Podcast for Cultural Reformation.

We have a lot of digital resources on our website, and we have a small publishing house as well. So those are the sort of the main things that we focus on. And if people are interested in any of that, it's EzraInstitute .com where they'd be able to find out more about our ministry and our work.

That's awesome. Ezra being the priest who leads this sort of cultural reformation, is that where you got the name from?

Yeah, that's great. Precisely, Ezra. Nehemiah used to be one book. And usually when you hear sermons on that period of history, it's all about Nehemiah, the guy who rebuilt the walls. But actually Ezra was the scholar who went amongst the people and recovered the law of God, and then taught the people the law of God the word of God and called them to repentance so that they abandoned their syncretism and their idolatry and became faithful to the Lord.

So that when Nehemiah then comes along and says, right, who's up for the project of rebuilding? There were actually volunteers. So if Nehemiah had come before Ezra and done his work, there wouldn't have been any rebuilding.

And so we sort of see the role of Ezra to rebuild the framework of the Christian mind, call people back to the fullness of the word so that the kingdom building project that needs the volunteers to step forward in our day will go on and flourish.

Oh, that's so good. I love that because we tend to, in America at least, we tend to try to make cultural renewal happen top down, and yet it really needs to happen from a revival or from a just, yeah, a revival of the people before we can go into that.

So I love that. Let's just jump in, brother. I know we have limited time today. How did you come to post-millennialism? Were you born that way, like Lady Gaga? Or did you come to it over time? How did you come to post-millennialism?

Well, no, I grew up in a very, very different tradition. I would have grown up in the premillennial dispensational tradition in the church. I remember being very dissatisfied with it even in my teens, thinking this doesn't make any sense to me when I've got my Bible open here and this doesn't add up.

But I didn't really come back to it seriously until I was in my days at seminary, and then really came to a convinced, optimistic eschatological perspective when I began reading some of the reformational thinkers, and most especially R .J. Rushduni.

That's awesome.

How Postmillennialism Emerged from Reading the Whole Bible

What in particular, as you were reading from guys like Rushduni, was it that really solidified things for you?

Well, I think that when we deal with any sort of major doctrine in God's word, we have to do so in the light of all of scripture. And I think one of the problems that is common among many Christians, the habit we tend to have, we can slip into easily of proof texting here and there, and you often find that people's eschatological position hangs on one or two strained readings of particular Bible verses like Revelation 20, but it hasn't been developed in light of all of scripture.

And what I found in people like Boettner and Rushduni and others was the big picture, the 10 ,000 foot view of the word of God, the whole story of scripture, especially the emphasis of the keynote, to my mind, of the Bible, which is the kingdom of God in and through Jesus Christ.

And when you look at all of scripture through the lens of the gospel of the kingdom, for me, it was like being handed a new Bible. Suddenly the word of God started to come into focus. So rather than being blurry around the edges, suddenly it was like it came into real focus.

It became sharp for me. And it also was something that clearly met the need of the hour. I mean, oftentimes people's eschatological views, unfortunately, get formed around not the eyes of faith, but the eyes of doubt and fear and anxiety.

And if you look at the massive growth of the popularity of dispensationalism in particular, which was invented over here in England in Plymouth in the 19th century by J .N. Darby and then popularized by Schofield in the early 20th century, it was in a time when we had had this massive popularity sort of through the early to middle part of the 20th century was after two world wars.

The optimism of the 19th century was dying away. And Christians are beginning to think, the end of the world is coming. Everything's falling apart and so on and so forth. And rather than looking at scripture and saying, well, actually we're under judgment for our rebellion and apostasy.

That's why we started to construct eschatologies of retreat and defeat. And so when I encountered the post-millennial vision in light of the kingdom of God and began to see scripture in that light, I began, despite everything that's going on in our world, in the Western world right now, that God's purposes and his plan for humanity and his creation is not going to be thwarted.

And history does this. It's not a straight line. It's that it goes vertically to the consummation of all things. History has its vicissitudes and challenges and problems and so forth. Calvin talks about the necessity of it being that way because of the trials that transform and shape us.

But I realized that reading scripture in this lens made sense of it in a way that these other positions didn't and was reading scripture in the light of faith, not a sort of secularized pessimism about the world.

That's so good. And honestly, just as you were talking, it makes so much sense because the Bible tells us to walk by faith and not by sight, and yet a lot of these eschatological views really are walking by sight.

It's what's going on in today's world, the headlines, the general malaise of pessimism that we kind of carry with us as Americans and maybe as Britons as well. I don't know as much about the ethos.

Of the British culture,.

But I know for us, we're sort of a pessimistic people. We're always upset about something. We're always being fed panic and pessimism on our TV. So it just kind of makes sense why it would thrive. But yet we are to not walk that way.

We're to walk by faith, which is I think post-millennialism requires you to have faith in the promises of God.

That's right.

Yeah.

What verse, if there is a verse or maybe it's, you said the whole biblical view, and that honestly was what it was for me as well, but is there a particular passage that was meaningful to you as you even talk to people, tell people about optimistic eschatology, any of that?

Yeah.

Well, the scriptures are shot through with the eschatology, I would say, of the post-mill position. It's often the case, again, when we look at the various eschatologies that people will want to hang it on one verse here or there.

And a bit like you, for me, it was seeing, it was, eschatology for many people is about last things, but actually eschatology is as much about first things as it is about last things. It's about direction.

And so sometimes the passages and the verses that struck me most and have been most significant in my thinking are not the ones at the very end of the Bible in the book of Revelation, although there are many important passages there too, but they are scattered throughout because eschatology is about direction and purpose in history.

It is not simply about last things. So it begins for me with Genesis 3 .15 and the first promise that the seed of the woman is going to crush the serpent's head. That's a promise of victory, of conquest by the seed of the woman, who, of course, we learn in the course of the redemptive revelation of scripture is the last Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is putting into reverse the consequences of the mistakes, the sin, the ruin of the first Adam.

The Abrahamic covenant is absolutely vital when we think then, as you move out of those first 11 chapters of Genesis, you've got the calling of Abraham and the remarkable promise to Abraham that through the seed, his seed, we've heard about the seed in Genesis 3 .15, but so now the seed gets narrowed down, his seed, all the nations of the world will be blessed.

And Paul tells us in Galatians that the seed of Abraham is Christ and all who are in Christ. So all who know the Lord Jesus Christ become recipients and participants within the covenant of Abraham that we become a blessing to the nations.

And as Paul says, actually in Romans 4 .13, we become heirs actually of the whole earth, of the whole cosmos actually is the word there. We're heirs of the cosmos. So the land grant that was limited initially to ethnic Israel is expanded to the whole people of God.

And naturally then the land grant is the whole earth, not just a small strip of land. And so Jesus Christ is clear that we are the children of Abraham. We're the seed of Abraham. We've come and we've sat down.

We've come from the East and the West and we've sat down in the kingdom with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Remember Jesus said to the Pharisees and those who thought that they could rely on their ethnic background, because we're children of Abraham and Jesus says, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.

So the Abrahamic covenant is critical. And then you move into the Psalms where the seed of Abraham. And of course the line has been narrowed now to Judah of the seed of Abraham, the lion of the tribe of Judah and the Davidic kingdom that somebody's gonna sit on the throne of David forever.

Well, who's that going to be? It can only be the lion of the tribe of Judah, the last Adam, the seed of Abraham. And so as you go into the Psalms, you've got Psalm two and there you have a promise of this Messiah king inheriting all of the nations, ruling the kings of the earth with a rod of iron, judging the nations.

You've got Psalm 27, all the ends of the earth are going to remember the Lord. They're going to come to him. You've got Psalm 47, similar promises. Psalm 72 and Psalm 72 will be of interest to all the Canadian listeners because Psalm 72 verse eight is actually the motto of the Canadian dominion.

He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. It's probably the Psalm 72, probably the most post-millennial of all of the Psalms as it promises this international kingship in history of the Messiah king.

And then you've got Psalm 110, which is the most quoted of all of the Old Testament passages in the New Testament, which is basically about everything being brought into subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Move into Isaiah, and then you've got, okay, well, what were the results of this foretold messianic kingdom be and its peace and prosperity and long life and the nations coming to hear the law, calling and waiting for the law of God, all the Gentile nations waiting for the law of God.

And then of course, critically, Daniel chapter two and Daniel chapter seven, because in Daniel two, you have the picture of the small uncut stone that shatters the image that Nebuchadnezzar sees. So you have the image of the four empires, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek and the Roman empire.

And it's shattered by this small uncut stone, which strikes the feet of the statue, which is the strength and weakness of the iron and the stone of the Roman empire. And we're told that at the time of these kings, a new kingdom is gonna be established.

So during the Roman empire, this new kingdom is gonna be established. And then that idolatrous kingdom is shattered. And that uncut stone grows to fill the whole earth. And so from the prophecies of Daniel, and of course, Daniel chapter seven is all about the nature of this great kingdom and all the promises.

You've got that lovely image of the son of man coming with the clouds to the ancient of days and being given a kingdom. And so this is Christ's ascension. He's been raised from the dead. He's now ascending with the clouds into the presence of the ancient of days where he's given a kingdom.

And so that's why we've got the great commission in Matthew 28. Jesus says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Now you can go and discipline, disciple, teach the nations. And you get a glimpse into this, the rule and dominion of the son in Colossians chapter one and Ephesians chapter one.

And then the absolute clincher is first Corinthians 15, where you have Paul's delineation of the order in which things happen. Where at the finally, only at the end is the kingdom handed to the father.

And then the last enemy to be defeated is death. So you have everything being brought into subjection. The kingdom is given to the father at the end. And then at the consummation there, death itself is undone and defeated.

And we have the full inauguration of the kingdom of God. So those are just the highlights from Genesis through revelation as to why I think, scripture gives us this glorious vision of the progressive victory of the kingdom of God in and through Christ.

And of course, Jesus parables about the kingdom in the gospels tell us, look, don't fear, don't be anxious, don't be in doubt because this kingdom, it's like a mustard seed. It's so small, the wind could just blow it away.

You can barely see it, but it grows and becomes the greatest tree in the garden or the yeast. It's that very small amount of yeast that gets into the loaf and then over time grows and expands and so on.

So you've always got the kingdom images are always ones of seeming insignificance, but gradual, steady, huge impact in the timing of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That's a beautiful vision and you painted it so well. I loved, right even there in the beginning as you were talking about it, you said, hey, this seed in Genesis three is gonna be the one that crushes the serpent and that seed is gonna be the one Genesis 12, who brings God's blessings to the entire earth.

And then Romans four, we're made inheritors of that. I also, I think that an astounding passage that for some reason I'd read the Bible a couple of times through when I saw it and I was like, who put this in the Bible?

Romans 16, 20, where not only do we become inheritors of this kingdom, we participate in the crushing of Satan with Jesus because it says the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet in Romans 16, 20, which I think tells us a lot about what Jesus wants us to do in the world and I think it's a good segue for us to now move into cultural engagement.

And maybe, I don't know exactly where to start, but maybe we should just start with the fact of, are we called to engage with culture? What does that look like? How are we supposed to do it? Let's paint a vision for this because I think we've lost something in our modern Christianity when it comes to our purpose, especially in this regard.

The Kingdom of God and Cultural Engagement

Well, I'm glad you mentioned the Romans 16 there because of course Paul tells us that we are seated with Christ in heavenly places. Jesus told us, occupy till I come and then he sends us out with authority because he has all authority, we have authority and that of course becomes the basis for our cultural engagement.

It's probably helpful just to note at the outset that culture, cultus, cult, is grounded in the idea of worship. So culture is merely the public expression of the faith of a people. It's the public expression, it's the external expression of the worship of a people.

So culture is religion externalized. So if you ask the average Christian, do you want people to come to know Jesus? The answer will be invariably yes, in which case the logical extension of that, the logical implication of that is that they will externalize, in other words, they will apply what they have come to know and believe in their life.

So sometimes the image of the hand is quite helpful, the palm is the middle of the hand and that's, if you like, the heart. The heart is transformed by the gospel, by regeneration, but then the transformation of the heart affects every aspect of our lives.

Every digit of the hand is dependent here on the palm. This is where, this is the center, but then all of these different aspects, family life, vocational life, civic life, cultural life, et cetera, et cetera.

This is all going to now reflect the transformation that's taken place in our hearts. So some people do at the beginning as believers and many Christians ask the question, well, what is the relationship between Christ and culture, between faith and culture?

Well, Jesus has told us all authority in heaven and earth belongs to me. Paul tells us in Christ all things hold together, they all consist. Romans 11, 36 says it's from him, through him, to him are all things.

And so Paul tells us elsewhere, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all for the glory of God. So even in the most mundane things, our lives in their totality are to be guided by the word of God and the reality of the lordship and kingship of Jesus Christ.

So the cultus for us, the Lord Jesus Christ, we worship the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. We then externalize the reality of that. And so Paul expects when he's writing his letters that, don't forget his letters aren't, the letters of the New Testament aren't simply written to churches, they're written to Christians, to parents, to employers, masters, servants, rulers, magistrates, whoever we are in the life of the church, the word of God applies to us, not just the institutional life of the church.

And so Paul expects that a person who's been converted and has come to faith in himself is gonna have a transformed marriage and that the person who's come to faith in Christ is gonna be transformed as a parent and that children are going to be transformed because of their relationship with Christ and their attitude to their parents, employers to their employees, employees to their employers.

Paul, I think at the end of the book of Philippines, when he's writing to the church at Philippi, I think he's in Rome at the time, he concludes with a very interesting statement. He says, all the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar's household.

So we know that there are Christians in the household of Caesar who have already been converted and the word of God applies to them too as they think about their role, their work, their office. So the gospel of the kingdom, which is the evangel, the good news that Christ is on the throne and is victorious, which is the word borrowed actually from the ancient world evangel gospel, is a declaration, it's a heralding of the good news that the king is victorious and on his throne.

That transforms the way we think about every aspect of our lives, of our cultural life, the way we externalize our beliefs. It just means that there's a consistency between what we believe and think and how we live it out.

And surely every Christian, when they understand the logic of that, will want to have a kingdom vision of victory, will recognize that the culture of Christ has a name. It's called the kingdom of God.

That's why we pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The Church, the Kingdom, and the Great Commission

Well, maybe someone would say, okay, that's great. Jesus has done this. He's given authority. He has all authority. He shared his authority with his church and we're building our culture as the church, this counterculture, but the world out there, they're gonna go to hell in a handbasket.

We're focused on building our culture. What would you say to that, someone who lives that way or thinks that way?

Well, it's the basic problem there of conflating and confusing the kingdom of God, the Basileia, with the church of God, the Ecclesia. So those are the terms that the New Testament uses. Now, Jesus didn't come preaching the gospel of the church.

He came preaching the gospel of the kingdom because the message of the entirety of scripture is that the kingdom of God is expanding and growing, his rule, his reign, his redemptive reign, his kingship.

To that end, to the end that his kingdom is extended and grows, he calls out a people, the Ecclesia, a called out people. And that people are put on mission in terms of the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God, the rule and reign of God does not end with the institutional church.

In fact, Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God long before any local churches were instituted. He only mentions the Ecclesia a couple of times. So the called out people, they're always associated with one another, kingdom and church, but they're not identical.

So that's why you can have apostate, godless, faithless churches that do not reflect or represent the kingdom of God at all. Because the church and the kingdom aren't identical with the church is on mission in terms of the kingdom of God.

So we can't say, well, it's just Christians who in the church build their own ghettoized culture. It doesn't really affect the world. They're on sort of parallel tracks. No, the body of Christ because that's of course the main sense of church in the Bible as well is the body of Christ.

Well, the body of Christ isn't just gathered visibly on a Sunday morning for worship to hear the word and have the sacraments administered. The body of Christ is spread out throughout every aspect of life, every vocation, every area of life in every aspect of society throughout all of the world where the body of Christ is to obey the living God.

And so it's not just the church institute that is subject to Christ, but the body of Christ seeks to make the family and the workplace and the civic sphere and political life and magistrates and courts and police and artists and scientists and so forth.

All of this is to come under Christ's rule and reign as part of his kingdom, his total dominion over all of the nations and over every aspect of life. So Christ's lordship and kingship should be very clearly expressed in the Ecclesia amongst the gathered people of God, but that's where they're equipped to go out.

So, you know, Sunday they come together, worship the King of Kings. We worship with the angels in heaven as we all gather together, worshiping the lamb. So in a sense, Sunday is that heavenly experience where we come into the very presence, the throne room of God, join in with the worship of the angelic hosts.

And then on earth, then as in heaven, we go out Monday morning to apply the victory that we've just seen in heaven, that's where Christ is seated. That rule is then applied through his people who are given a ministry of reconciliation with co-laborers with Christ.

We go out then into every sphere of life as his body so that what we've just seen done in heaven is then done in the earth.

Yeah, that's so good. I would just, the great commission, even right there in the beginning, like all authority in heaven and earth now belong to me. Now he doesn't say, now therefore stay, or now therefore live huddled together in a clandestine community waiting for a rapture.

He says, in light of my authority, go and go into the nations and baptize those nations. And I love what Jesus says there, teach them not just individual Christians, teach the nations how to obey everything that I've commanded.

And then we ask ourselves the question, what has Jesus commanded? Well, you can scour the gospels and you can put together a list of imperatives, but you can also look in Luke 24, where he says that all of it's about me.

So teach the world how to obey the Bible. That's nothing short of that, that's what it is.

That's absolutely right. Everything I have commanded you includes, because the word of God is the word of our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, he is the word made flesh. He's not just the word that inspired the scriptures of the Older Testament, he's the word that called all things into existence.

So when we obey the word, we're obeying the totality of that word, and that's what we're teaching the nations to obey.

I love the picture of what you described, because we told our church this, that when we gather, we gather in the heavenly places. We gather with Christ. We leave Chelmsford, Massachusetts, when the call to worship is sent forth, and we go to be with Christ where he is.

Spiritually speaking, our bodies remain, but our souls are with the Lord. And I love that vision that you just painted of the order and the beauty and the submission and the joyful obedience that our souls experience in heaven is now our mission to imitate, based off the Lord's prayer, we come and imitate and become Jesus's emissaries to make the world look like that picture of heaven that we just experienced.

And what a grace that that is, that God has given us worship, because every week he's reminding us, okay, the part of your world, the part of your spheres of influence, the part of your family, your job, your vocation, your whatever, that doesn't look like heaven, I'm gonna remind you again.

I'm gonna show you the picture again so that you can go out and begin working to see that part of your life submitted to the Lord. And it becomes, church then becomes such an essential part of equipping us and empowering us for our, not just feeding our souls, but giving us a picture of our role in the cosmos.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think capturing a

You mentioned brother, oh.

Yeah, capturing a sense of that, that in a sense, the church signals to the rest of the world, the meaning and the direction of all of history. That's what's going on in the life of the church. This is the, amongst the redemptive people, the redeemed of the Lord, you see the direction of history and the nations.

Yeah, amen.

Bringing Every Sphere of Life Under Christ’s Lordship

You mentioned something a second ago, and I just wanna say it clearly and then have you respond to it. We're talking about all of the world coming under the Lordship of Christ and submitting to Him. That means politics, that means art, that means healthcare.

Wouldn't that be incredible? And won't that be incredible when that comes under the Lordship of Christ? Technology, things like technological development, all of these spheres of life that we interact with all the time are going to come under the Lordship of Christ.

And since that's true, the question is not whether we will engage with culture, it's how we will engage, because we will either do it effectively, we will either do it faithfully, or we will do it unfaithfully.

So let's now talk about how do we, as people, have a strategy for engaging culture, for the glory of God, to see it come under the Lordship of Christ.

Well, I think when we sort of ask a macro question like that, you can have a macro answer, which, you know, a sort of a big picture answer, which is we must think through and work out and develop in every area the implications of Christ's Lordship.

So what does it mean to see the truth of God's law word applied to every area of life? What does it mean to deal with every discipline within our culture or within our education system in terms of Christ's Lordship and a biblical world and life view?

And of course, when you put it like that, every single one of these areas needs focused attention. We need to work it out. We need people, Christians, called who are magistrates, lawyers, doctors, teachers, the teacher who's gonna say, well, you know, as a Christian, it's not just that I'm a teacher who happens to be a Christian, and so therefore, well, let's get the teachers together, have a lunchtime prayer meeting, although that's fine.

It's how do we build a Christian curriculum for doctors? It's not just, oh, I'm a doctor who happens to be a Christian, so maybe I should do an evangelism Bible study on a Friday afternoon for the doctors to try and reach their friends in the hospital.

Do that by all means, but what about working out a scriptural view of medicine? What does the Bible say about health, healing, wholeness? How do we develop a Christian vision of medicine? In law, you might be a lawyer or a solicitor, an attorney.

Again, wonderful, have a Friday afternoon prayer meeting for Christian attorneys, but what does it also mean to work out a Christian view of the law? How do I think about law from a biblical standpoint?

And so you could go through almost all of the various areas of life and say the same thing, because what we've tended to do is say, well, that the extent of the Christian calling is that we have to share the forgiveness of Jesus and the redemptive work of Christ at the cross with our friends so that they come to know God so that they have a secure eternal destiny.

And that's the end of the calling rather than recognizing that's just beginning. That's rung number one. Rung number one is that we share Christ died, was raised as ascended to heaven and grants us salvation.

Now, what are the implications of that reconciliation to God? Scripture tells us that we've been alienated from God because of our sin and rebellion. Christ reconciles us to God. One of the consequences of being alienated from God is that we seek then to alienate God's creation from him.

We want to alienate marriage from God. We want to alienate government from God. We want to alienate science from God. We want to alienate the arts from God. We want to pervert all things. Just as you said, as responding beings, human beings can either respond to God faithfully or in apostasy and rebellion.

Well, in apostasy and rebellion, as those who are alienated from God, the non-believer, the unbeliever, I should say, approaches every area of life in such a way that they're seeking to alienate that area of life from God just as they are alienated from God.