The Radical Kingdom - Part 1 — Art Katz

There's a remarkable indifference in the Earth to the fact that this planet was visited by God. I don't know what it takes. I think we just have to recognize that we're in a kind of a sleepwalk, a stupor.

The Church’s Failure to Recognize God’s Visitation

That the God of this world has blinded the mind, not only those who do not believe, but those who only nominally believe. And that the impact or the fact, the significance that this planet was visited by very God has not penetrated us to the depths of our understanding.

I very much agree with the brother who said, we're not yet ready for the second coming of the Lord, because we have not yet fully appropriated the meaning of his first coming. There's not a sufficient sense of astonishment, and no one is really raising the electric question of why it is that God would choose in a point of time to visit the Earth.

And for what purposes did he come? And what was affected by his coming? And what is the significance to us who remain? It's more than just a matter of historical curiosity or interest. It's amazing in the same sense as I'm speaking now of this cosmic impersonalism of a world without God, or even if it's a world with God, what has he done but set it in motion and abandoned it to men?

A kind of mechanistic universe that prevails and perpetuates itself in which God does not have to be too seriously considered. Therefore it's not at all surprising that in the vital interest that affects the lives of men and of nations, God is not invoked, nor is he sought.

It's just remarkable to pick up a newspaper or a newsweek or Time, and to see that the media is filled with the counsels of men about the issues of war and peace, and what ought to be done, and what constitutes wisdom, but never once is there any mention or reference to the fact that there's a God who can be considered, whose counsel can be sought, whose will can be obtained, or who was here at one time and has spoken and has left us a body of statements that he intends to prevail in terms of the conduct of nations and of men.

There's a remarkable indifference toward God that amounts to a rejection, and I hold the Church responsible for allowing such views as these to prevail, because when it comes to the effectual circumstances of our own lives, though we believe the way that we conduct our lives and make our own decisions is virtually in keeping with exactly the way that the world makes theirs.

God is not radically taken into our own consideration, and we make our decision, whether it's going to a college or getting married or establishing a business, or any such thing, on the same basis of appeal to reason, to logic, to circumstance, to convenience, to advantage, as by which the world makes its reckonings.

The world is indifferent to God, because we who believe have not radically taken God into our consideration. The conditions have become such that any thought of bringing God into the counsels of men is considered a violation, and it's ironic that it's the world who raises the issue of the separation of Church and State, as if somehow the State needs to be protected against the Church, that somehow the Church is not to have any voice, not to stick its nose in, not to sound itself, not to express itself, not to bring the counsels of God into the secular affairs of men.

This would violate the separation of Church and State, altogether forgetting that the principle, when it was first invoked, was invoked to protect not the State but the Church, that God never intended that there be the distinctions of sacred and secular, which prevail today and constitute the comfortable categories not only of the world but of the Church itself.

In my opinion, God intended for the penetration of the secular by the sacred, and the Church is the agency and the instrument by which the divine is to come into the ordinary, and the eternity is to come into time.

The Kingdom of God as Sacred Penetration of the World

These things have been lost to us in exactly the same proportion as the kingdom of God has been lost to us, because, for very fact, this is the kingdom of God. This penetration of the world is a kingdom come.

But in keeping with the kind of impersonalism that prevails, and God only as a Sunday object, the phrase, the kingdom, has lost its currency or has never been known. It's a kind of airy phrase that refers in some vague way to some distant thing that perhaps is our experience after we die.

The Church has little expectancy for a kingdom come in earth as it is in heaven. The remarkable thing is that the Church has allowed the world to define it, to define its function, to define its role, to define its activity.

I'm reminded of the condition of Israel in its apostasy, and the people love to have it so. As I go on, I think you'll recognize that the alternative to what is prevailing, namely a Church that is kingdom-oriented, an active, victorious, and triumphant Church, requires from its members challenging things in the pursuit of which the consequence is going to be, at the least, reproach and persecution, and at the uttermost, martyrdom.

I pray that you'll stay for all three speakings, because I want to conclude with the theme of martyrdom, not as some kind of rare experience for the very few because they were not wise enough to avoid the consequence, but as the normative logic and result of the faith as it is truly pursued in a world that is not only indifferent, but hostile against it.

The fact that we do not expect martyrdom, and that we are not preparing for it, is another statement exactly in keeping to what statements I've already made, that the Church is living beneath God's kingdom intentions.

We do not share the apostolic view of the Church Fathers. We do not share the apostolic view of the radical Anabaptists of the 16th century, who were burnt at the stake, tortured in dungeons, bound back to back, because they saw as the context of the drama in which their own Christian life was set, two kingdoms in inextricable conflict and clash, a kingdom of darkness and a kingdom of light.

They had, as it were, a kingdom view, and they lived out of that kind of seeing, and therefore they had a radical impact in the communities in which they were, and the result was persecution. Not so much from the world or from the state, as from the prevailing religious bodies, who saw their kind of Christianity as threatening and intimidating, and going beyond the safe prescriptions that they wanted to define Christianity as.

The Church Domesticated by the World

All these things have relegated the Church to a nominal and secondary place, a kind of an institutional adjunct to society. The Church has been effectually domesticated, maintained. Its role has been defined by the world.

It has given us the hour in which we can safely conduct our services, without interrupting the football schedules or the golf course. And so long as we adhere to a schedule of services and see the faith as a Sunday continuum, a succession of services, and that the Church keeps its nose out of the world's business and recognizes and stays within the confines that have been established for it, we will be allowed our tax-deductible advantages and the like.

The adherents of the Church constitute in the world's sight a kind of fraternal order, or a society sharing a quaint vocabulary and a hymnology whose presence can be tolerated so long as it does not interfere in the things of the world that really count.

I'm staggered even as I'm reviewing these things myself. And you'll hear from me probably tomorrow, but I just feel like saying it now. Except that the Church introduced truth and righteousness into the earth, there is no means by which these things can be admitted.

Do you realize that? Righteousness and truth are distinctives of the Church alone. Only the Church has the capacity to understand the meaning of these words as they are spirit words given from heaven and are understood not by reference to the dictionary, but in the living experience of the saints, whose God would have righteousness to dwell in the earth.

And except that the Church makes truth and righteousness visible through its conduct and through its presence, there is no way for the world to understand what these words mean. The Church itself lives as the world, that is to say, as if God does not really exist, and that no practical import into their daily lives is expected by virtue of their believing.

I know that that's not true for most of you, but I'm making a statement about the Church at large, because your heart needs to break, and you need to see and understand the condition of the Church as God himself sees it.

What am I saying here? That those who bear the name of Christ themselves do not believe that there's going to be an existential consequence for their life by virtue of their believing. In other words, they expect to have cancer, they expect nervous breakdowns, colds, flus, divorces, and all of the kind of malady and complaint and misfortune that besets anyone in the world.

The fact that they believe does not effectually touch the practicalities of their life. And therefore we confirm the world in an attitude toward the Church which is antiseptic, and relegates the Church of no consequence, because they see that it has no visible consequence for those who profess the belief.

Instead of seeing transcendent men and women, who are living above disease, and above calamity, and above disaster, they see them beset by the same kinds of misfortune as those who make no profession to believing.

Such things ought not to be, and the reason that they prevail is, because the Church is not the Church until it recognizes its kingdom mandate. It always will live beneath the intent of God, in the transcendent and powerful place that God intended for it, until it lifts its eyes to understand its kingdom call.

Its life is more than a succession of Sundays. Our salvation is intended to procure something in this earth. We're intended to affect nations and societies. We are a light unto the world. We're not just a fraternal society that has its own peculiar vocabulary and hymnology.

The Lordship of God in Every Decision

As I said before, the decision-making of most Christians is like the world, predicated upon secular premises, reason, logic, need, self-interest, probability. It is not assumed that God has a will in such matters, that it can be discovered and obeyed, or that it is indeed His normative intention for those who call upon His name.

And so long as we believe that... See, what we believe is not what we say we believe. What we believe is what we demonstrate in the actuality of our life. And so long as that actuality does not demonstrate a God whose will can be revealed and obeyed, then the world has no obligation to consider Jesus as both God and Lord, or King.

So long as they see us predicating our lives, and making our decisions on secular premises, and not the consultation of God's will, in a faith that believes that it can be revealed by the Spirit, because we have the intent of obeying it, the world is under no obligation to take the Church seriously.

And as we understand clearly, except that He's the Lord of everything, He's the Lord of nothing. So long as that we have a mentality that divides the great questions into small, and consults for the will of God in what we consider the great questions, and allows ourselves the prerogative of making our decisions in what we consider the things that are small, we ourselves are suffering from an inadequate view of the King and the Kingdom.

For in the Kingdom of God, there is no decision that is small. There is no issue that is little. He's totally the Lord, or He's not Lord at all, and that's something that has got to be more than just a piece of our doctrine.

It's got to be demonstrated in the actuality and the totality of all of our living. Another demerit of the Church that reveals to the world that there is no such thing as a King or a Kingdom, is our attitude toward sickness, toward accident, and toward death, as being wholly arbitrary.

It just happens. It's the way the cookie crumbles, or it's natural, or it's a disease, or I caught it. The Church has little sense of divine causation, little awareness of cause and effect, of things that come from God, as chastisement, as judgment, or for the various reasons in which God will allow things to happen.

And so we dismiss our things as the world dismisses it, and therefore we pair to the same remedies, whether it's aspirins or doctors, without asking why it is that we're suffering an economic setback, or a calamity in marriage, or a failure in health, or the various other things by which God is seeking to probe and to touch us.

We do not have a Kingdom view that sees the hand of God in our circumstances, and therefore the world is not obliged to see the hand of God in theirs. Another aspect of this cosmic impersonalism, of not bringing God vitally into the world which He created, is a lack of awareness of the invisible spirit world, which is greatly dismissed, and is outside the consciousness of most Christians.

There is no practical knowledge of the wiles of the enemy who manipulates his victims at will. The prevalence of Halloween, or jokes about the devil, or pictures of him in magazines with a tail and a three-pronged trident, and all of these kinds of cultural things show the complete dismissal of one of the most awesome facts that constitutes the reality of the universe, namely the existence of a whole spirit world of principalities and powers and rulers of darkness that affect the conduct of nations and men.

And because the church has not sufficiently reckoned on that, does not sufficiently believe it, and does not walk and live as if it believes it, the world has not been required either to take it seriously into its consideration.

And therefore Satan is having an unparalleled opportunity to jerk, to intimidate, to threaten, and to affect the conduct of nations without the slightest awareness that he is the source behind the evil that prevails in the world in a church that is too anemic even to indicate the source, let alone to bring the remedy.

They have not understood the great conflict between light and darkness that underlines all reality, both in history, the things of the past, and of the future. This is a kingdom consciousness that needs to be restored.

Recovering the Church’s Biblical Past and Future

As a matter of fact, the church is devoid of any sense of the past. It does not have in its consciousness a sense of the history of the church in the vital way that it should. It does not have a living sense of continuum, of its antecedent conditions that go all the way back to the apostolic church and come up into modern times.

And because we are cut off from the vital knowledge of the past, it is not an accident to find that we have no real regard for the future either. We are lacking a sense of the things that are imminent and are about to take place.

We are without a past and we are without a future and therefore our present is emasculated. We have no sense of real eternal expectation. And one of the earliest sources of pain for me as a Jewish believer was to hear as a cliché references by Christians to the Lord's soon coming.

I could hear those statements and I was never once persuaded. That is to say, people speak it as a trite cliché, as a conventional kind of burp. But there is no real conviction or passionate or palpitating expectation of the soon coming of the Lord.

This is as much lost to our living consciousness as any regard to the past and therefore we do not see ourselves as the successors or the inheritors of those who constitute around us even tonight the cloud of invisible witnesses.

We are cut off from both the past and the future because both these things are elements in a true kingdom view. As we have no sense of the past and no sense of the future, so also do we lack a sense of the glory of God.

You can quiz any number of Christians for a definition of that word glory and they'll be hard pressed to give you an answer. And in a certain sense I sympathize because it's not a word that lends itself to an easy definition.

But this much is true, there's not a jealousy for the glory of God. There's not an anticipation of the glory of God. There's not an expectation that there's a glory to be experienced or to be sought. We have so long been accustomed to living outside the glory of God as something visible or felt or experienced that we measure our meanings by another criteria altogether.

Whether they were good, whether we enjoyed them, whether it was well attended, whether the offerings were successful. When the only true kingdom measure of the success of anything is how it pertains to the glory of God.

I'm mentioning all of the factors that are absent from the consciousness of the church to the same degree as is the absence of the kingdom. And therefore it's no accident that as the sense of God's glory is absent, so also is any reference to suffering.

Suffering, the Cross, and the Glory of God

Not only is suffering absent, it is avoided and even despised. And even theologies and doctrines have grown up in modern times that have relegated suffering or any anticipation of suffering as somehow being outside the faith and needless in the experience of most Christians.

But I want to go on record tonight as saying that to the degree to which we shun a necessary suffering in the pursuit of apostolic faith, to that same degree will we also miss His glory. There's a place for suffering and as I intend to show tomorrow in conclusion, it is a central place and it has everything to do with the cross which has equally been lost to our consciousness.

I am hard pressed as I stand here tonight to remember when I have heard a message on the cross preached last. The cross is no longer in vogue, I don't know that it ever was in. And yet when you read the apostolic literature, when you read the literature of the Anabaptists or any revival, restoration of true kingdom church reality, you see the centrality of the cross, the expectancy of suffering and the jealousy for the glory of God as being central to the consciousness of the saints of that generation.

They need to be restored to our own. Glory is absent, the suffering is absent, hope is absent. Dynamic faith is absent. Faith has become somehow a formula, a genie lamp which we rub to obtain Cadillacs or other things that pertain to our personal benefit.

But faith in the sense that it was apostolically understood as a mode of life, a radical cleaving to God, an utter trust, a dynamic. To that sense, faith is lost, hope is lost, and love is lost or never been known in the sense of being self-sacrificing, utterly giving, unconditional.

And so also in this catalogue of things lost is the knowledge of the resurrection life. The doctrine remains, but the knowledge of the life has been lost or has never been known. And one of my prayers for this very seminar is that when you not only hear speaking on these things, but you'll see the very demonstration of them.

Because it's very clear to me, as I'd sense what God wants to set before you in the short space that we have together, that the only way it can conceivably be done is by the resurrection life of Him, Himself.

By the wisdom that adheres in that life. By the dynamic and the power of that life. We have really forfeited the doctrine of the resurrection except that we are actually living in it. And it's interesting that one of the central things for which the Anabaptists, the radical reform wing of the Protestant Reformation was persecuted, was their belief in the incarnate life of Christ and the body of Christ.

That they should say with Paul, for us to live is Christ. This was considered scandalous in the ears of Catholics and Lutherans who bring them at the stake and were all the more persuaded that these heretics must be of the devil because they had the joy and the glory of God even in the moments of their martyrdom.

They show for such a demonstration of the life of God which was so unknown by conventional religionists of their generation that the very demonstration of that life was proof to those who persecuted and killed them that they were in heresy.

Or else they would have been just as grey, just as lackluster, just as unbelieving, just as cynical, just as full of self-apology as those who persecuted them. The prevailing mentality of the Reformed Church whether it was Lutheran, Swingly, Calvinistic or whatever in the generation that persecuted these radicals was that I'm only a sinner saved by grace.

God knows I'm only human. There was no expectation for perfection. There was no expectation to obtain Christ-likeness or the character of God or Lamb-likeness. And those who made such profession and believed that there was a way that it could be obtained by union with Him in baptism were considered so heretical as to be destroyed.

And I have an anticipation in my own spirit that we're going to see that same drama enacted again at the conclusion of the age. That there will be those who will kill us claiming that they are doing God a service.

That's not the world speaking. It's religion speaking. Because something so offensive has risen that cannot be tolerated namely a people who have an apostolic faith and a kingdom view and believe where kingdom come on the basis of the power of life that broke all fetters of death when it rose from the dead and can be fulfilled and enacted and expressed through the body of saints who are in the earth now.

I'm quoting now from a precious writer who says cosmic impersonalism is a way of banishing personal responsibility from the universe. It enables men to ignore the possibility of final judgment. In terms of a fixed set of ethical standards.

God as Creator, Judge, and Lord

Because if the world is just a random accident if God is not its creator and therefore its Lord if it just happened by chance then there is no fixed standard. There is no divine ethic. There is no requirement made of men.

Anything goes and therefore there is no judgment. But it's interesting to see the kind of view held by the apostolic fathers the kingdom view that believe that God had appointed a day in which he will judge all men.

He will judge the world in righteousness Paul says in Acts 17 through a man whom he has appointed having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. I don't have time in the few occasions that we have together these days but I invite you to look to the reference to the day of the Lord the judgment of God.

God as judge as being one of the central factors of the consciousness of the apostolic generation. Completely lost from our own consideration for which reason we are still fornicating like jackrabbits or at least contemplating the possibilities.

The easy standards that have prevailed in our charismatic evangelical age is a testimony to the fact that we unlike the apostolic church fathers do not believe that God is a judge. And we have not the faith to believe that we are actually being observed.

We have not a living conscience which establishes what our conduct is when we're not being observed and determines what kinds of thoughts we allow ourselves to think when we're free to think what we will.

We do not believe with Paul really in our hearts that God has appointed a day in which he will judge all men. For all that they have done in their bodies both good and because the church has not communicated the sense of judge the world is on a reckless course of such abandon of such apostasy of such total self-indulgence and gratification so as to make the things that God looks upon as abomination standards of behavior in our own generation or at least alternate lifestyles.

Sodomy has become an alternate lifestyle because there's no fixed standard because there's no judge because there's no law word that God has given which is common to every generation and that has not passed because grace has come.

The world is in its very condition because we have not lived as a nation of priests before it to teach the world the difference between the common and the profane and have not communicated the sense of the fear of God because we ourselves do not have it.

It says, knowing the terror of God I persuade men. And we have been notorious in our failure to persuade men. We may have enticed a few that God has a plan for their life or the benefit they'll receive if they make a decision and accept Jesus but we have persuaded very few because we ourselves do not know the terror.

We do not understand him as judge. We are not living as if we believe that God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world. We do not believe that there's a standard that God requires not only of the church but of nations and of men that righteousness exalts a nation and that the coming of God to earth was not just to bring a certain body of truth for a church but to bring a revelation of God for the earth.

We have not made the message known to the nations. I've just finished writing a letter to an officer of the American consulate in a certain African nation who called me long distance to explain to me why it is that two Africans whom we're desiring to come to us here in Minnesota and to attend our prophetical school cannot obtain their visas.

And in his explanation he passed a thin threshold in my opinion between being official and being officious that he was going to keep them from having their visas on the basis of certain opinions of his own far beyond what was actually required from him as an official.

And I wrote him a letter. We who have responsibility in government need to be reminded that we're only magistrates. That we have only a certain limited purview a certain area for valid activity to bring a certain sense of order and to uphold a righteousness that is pleasing in God's sight.

And that we need to remember that the earth in which our officialdom is being enacted is really and ultimately the Lord's. That men have a right to traverse the earth and to move in the fulfillment of his will.

And I realized that as I'm writing this letter to a highly articulate government official that he's an utterly secular man without the slightest awareness of these things in his vital consciousness because it has never been put there by the church.

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof and those that dwell therein. There's a righteousness which God is going to hold both nations and men responsible and for which he's going to judge them.

But this cosmic impersonalism allows men to dismiss from the universe which we himself made to dismiss his judgments to dismiss his standards to ignore the possibility of eternal punishment. It allows man to reinterpret all facts according to his purposes and ideals.

Because if there's not a God who created the universe and set his purposes in that creation if it's not moving towards some fulfillment in his will then we have the obligation as unaided men to provide our own purposes whether it's orgies or revolution which is indeed what men have done in the absence of the knowledge of the purposes which are God's which have not come to them because the church has not made them known.

Man becomes the determiner and interpreter of the universe. And understandably secular man prefers not to interpret the universe in terms of God's categories. He much prefers to live in the hypothetically random universe which is posited by modern humanism.

Therefore we need to contend for the faith. This contending for the faith that was once given to the saints is more than just a little Patsy formula. It is a total Weltanschauung. It is a whole world view.

The Dominion Mandate and Christian Worldview

It is a cosmic sense of the purposes of God that in here in his creation and through the church which is the agency intended for its fulfillment. We need to contend for that faith and we need to recognize that we are living in a poisoned atmosphere.

Poisoned because it is secular because it is skeptical because it is rationalistic. The God of this world has blinded the minds of those who do not believe. And it is these people who are shaping and influencing our culture and our civilization.

The world is becoming secularized and God is being omitted from the considerations of men. And therefore we are rushing pell-mell to a doom which is the consequence of living a life without the presence of God and his counsel.

If we lived in the atmosphere of revelation which God intended our every thought would express the truth which is laid in the creation of God. The wicked man, it says, forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and return unto the Lord.

You cannot believe how much we need to have our thoughts formed by God himself. Whereas our thoughts have been so much influenced by the world and the atmosphere that prevails that we do not have these kinds of expectancies or understandings because we have not the cosmic sense of God's own thoughts.

It is the plan of God that gives meaning and a fact is not truly known or understood except to the extent that it is related to God. God needs to be so alive in our consciousness. Every fact of our circumstance needs to be related to him.

Everything is seen in terms of what is his ultimate purpose and intent. And it is for the want of that seeing that our life is so presently marred and crippled and inadequate. We need the view of the largest cosmic sense of God's things to set our life in the context that God intended.

No fact of the universe is independent of God and his plan. He is both creator and Lord of the earth. And to the degree that the evolutionists have been able to dismiss God as creator to the same degree has modern thought been able to dismiss God as Lord.

So in the same Acts 17, Paul's sermon on Mars Hill he says to these philosophical and secular Greeks who embody the same spirit that prevails today in the world that the God who made the world verse 24 and all things in it since he is Lord of heaven and earth does not dwell in temples made with hands.

In the same breath and in the same statement Paul sets forth before secular Greeks that the God who made the world is both the Lord of heaven and the earth. There is a connection that cannot be broken that if God is the creator of the universe he is also its Lord.

Therefore there is a purpose because he is not a mindless or an aimless creator. And therefore our life has to be related to that purpose. We are falling short of his glory and we invite his judgment.

The random purposeless universe of the secularist ejects God from his own creation and autonomous man becomes his own God. Man becomes the source of cosmic purpose and the measure of all things. The famous statement, the axiom out of the enlightenment from which the whole genius of secular thinking has come is that man is the measure of all things.

When the truth of the matter is that God is the measure of all things. But so long as we have forfeited the field and have not made that God clear and have not demonstrated him in the awesome reality that we should man has prevailed as the measure of all things and asserts his sovereignty and control over nature.

And that's why we have genetic experiments today abortion, economic planning social elites, super states all of the phenomena of modern times that has threatened the very life of man and the planet itself that has made it insane that has loaded our institutions or has tortured untold numbers of men devoid of feeling or has permitted wars in their own self-interest caused them to let rivers of blood flow in modern times is all the statement that man is the measure of all things.

That he is sovereign and that he rightfully should control make his experiments, do his thing have his alternate lifestyles and make sodomy legitimate. There's so much more that can be said about how far man has gone and I hope I'm not throwing a little wrench in the works but I can't help but speak of the things that are pressed in my consciousness at this particular moment with a daughter who's about to graduate high school in her senior year and is now filling out her forms for college in terms of the requirements necessary to become a nurse.

And I find that she has to have algebra and chemistry and I forgot what other kinds of sciences and math which I doubt in a million Sundays she will ever be required to use. I'm becoming conscious of a kind of elite a kind of academic elite where the sovereignty of men prevail and where they arbitrarily determine what are the criteria by which you earn your diploma so that you can obtain a certain mode of living and a certain income and a certain entree to classes in society.

If God is absent and men themselves have to fill the vacuum they will define their own criteria and make their own rules. And the whole system has come to prevail that is senseless, time-consuming wasteful, self-perpetuating because God is absent from the counsels of men.

God’s Alternative: Dominion, Covenant, and Law

If this is the case what is an alternative Christian cosmology or world view? First that the universe was not established by God and then allowed to operate mechanistically by itself for the free exercise of men but that God gave a dominion mandate right from the beginning to man that is to prevail in the earth that is to fill the earth and that is to rule in the earth that is to be the sub-regent of God in the earth that the man who is made in God's image also is called to a purpose in God to prevail over the earth which God has made and to make that God known and His law.

The basis for order in society is a personal relationship between God and men who are in a covenantal relationship to obey His law in love to subdue the earth and to rule over it as the regents, the sub-regents of the Creator Himself on the basis of a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees and that exalts nations.

This is why I'm saying that you can't you'll not get this in one hearing I've not gotten this in one writing. What is the alternative to a random and aimless universe in which man does his own thing? Is to see that God is the Creator and also the Lord of heaven and the earth that He has given to us a mandate in dominion that we, men who are made in His image shall have dominion over the earth and that dominion is to be through the expression of His law and through the counsel of His will and because we have not believed that and have not consciously walked in it nor sought it nor expected it we have forfeited the field to secular men who have no regard for God and have done their own thing and filled the earth with their own nonsense.

If I had a good blackboard here and I don't know, maybe I can do it. I want you to see like two columns. One is a theocentric view in which God prevails and the other is a secular view in which God is absent.

In one is a random world in which man is free to do his own thing. In the other in which God is present there's a planned view there's a purposeful universe intended by God. Therefore it requires a knowledge of God and a knowledge of God's word for His word is a lamp unto our feet and it's by His word that we walk blamelessly before Him and blessed are they who walk blamelessly before Him.